A store-and-forward cloud-based telemonitoring system for automatic assessing dysarthria evolution in neurological diseases from video-recording analysis

TL;DR

This paper introduces a cloud-based telemonitoring system utilizing CNNs to analyze video recordings for tracking dysarthria progression in neurological patients, aiming to improve remote clinical assessments.

Contribution

It presents a novel store-and-forward telemonitoring architecture with integrated facial landmark detection for assessing dysarthria evolution from video data.

Findings

Achieved 1.79 normalized mean error in facial landmark localization on the Toronto NeuroFace dataset.

Demonstrated promising results in real-life ALS patient scenarios.

Supports remote monitoring of dysarthria, aiding clinical decision-making.

Abstract

Background and objectives: Patients suffering from neurological diseases may develop dysarthria, a motor speech disorder affecting the execution of speech. Close and quantitative monitoring of dysarthria evolution is crucial for enabling clinicians to promptly implement patient management strategies and maximizing effectiveness and efficiency of communication functions in term of restoring, compensating or adjusting. In the clinical assessment of orofacial structures and functions, at rest condition or during speech and non-speech movements, a qualitative evaluation is usually performed, throughout visual observation. Methods: To overcome limitations posed by qualitative assessments, this work presents a store-and-forward self-service telemonitoring system that integrates, within its cloud architecture, a convolutional neural network (CNN) for analyzing video recordings acquired by individuals with dysarthria. This architecture, called facial landmark Mask RCNN, aims at locating facial landmarks as a prior for assessing the orofacial functions related to speech and examining dysarthria evolution in neurological diseases. Results: When tested on the Toronto NeuroFace dataset, a publicly available annotated dataset of video recordings from patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and stroke, the proposed CNN achieved a normalized mean error equal to 1.79 on localizing the facial landmarks. We also tested our system in a real-life scenario on 11 bulbar-onset ALS subjects, obtaining promising outcomes in terms of facial landmark position estimation. Discussion and conclusions: This preliminary study represents a relevant step towards the use of remote tools to support clinicians in monitoring the evolution of dysarthria.