A Novel Sonification Approach to Support the Diagnosis of Alzheimer's Dementia
A Novel Sonification Approach to Support the Diagnosis of Alzheimer's Dementia
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DOI：
10.3389/fneur.2017.00647
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发表时间：
2017-12-07
影响因子：
3.4
通讯作者：
Roginska, Agnieszka
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Gionfrida, Letizia;Roginska, Agnieszka
阿尔茨海默病是痴呆症中最常见的一种神经退行性疾病，它会逐渐恶化，最终导致死亡。它的一系列症状包括认知功能丧失和记忆力下降。结构和功能成像方法，如CT、MRI和PET扫描，在诊断过程中发挥着至关重要的作用，能够识别大脑损伤的特定区域。虽然这些成像技术的准确性随着时间的推移而增加，但痴呆症的严重程度评估仍然具有挑战性，并且由于医生之间的读者内部差异而容易受到认知和感知错误的影响。医生们还没有就用于具体诊断个体痴呆症的细胞丢失的标准化测量达成一致。这些局限性导致研究人员寻找支持性诊断工具，以增强疾病的谱特征和特性。这里提出了一个支持性的听觉工具，以帮助诊断不同程度的阿尔茨海默氏症患者。该工具引入了一个映射到三个不同脑叶的听觉参数。这种支持性听觉技术背后的动力来自这样一个事实，即阿尔茨海默病的特点是大脑顶叶和颞叶的代谢活动减少(代谢不足)。然后通过将受影响肺叶的代谢活动与通常不受AD影响的其他肺叶(即感觉运动皮质)的代谢活动进行比较来进行诊断。诊断过程与基本事实的比较结果表明，医生能够使用在这项研究中产生的发声比使用标准诊断程序(仅基于可视化)更准确地对不同程度的AD进行分类。
Alzheimer's disease is the most common neurodegenerative form of dementia that steadily worsens and eventually leads to death. Its set of symptoms include loss of cognitive function and memory decline. Structural and functional imaging methods such as CT, MRI, and PET scans play an essential role in the diagnosis process, being able to identify specific areas of cerebral damages. While the accuracy of these imaging techniques increases over time, the severity assessment of dementia remains challenging and susceptible to cognitive and perceptual errors due to intra-reader variability among physicians. Doctors have not agreed upon standardized measurement of cell loss used to specifically diagnose dementia among individuals. These limitations have led researchers to look for supportive diagnosis tools to enhance the spectrum of diseases characteristics and peculiarities. Here is presented a supportive auditory tool to aid in diagnosing patients with different levels of Alzheimer's. This tool introduces an audible parameter mapped upon three different brain's lobes. The motivating force behind this supportive auditory technique arise from the fact that AD is distinguished by a decrease of the metabolic activity (hypometabolism) in the parietal and temporal lobes of the brain. The diagnosis is then performed by comparing metabolic activity of the affected lobes to the metabolic activity of other lobes that are not generally affected by AD (i.e., sensorimotor cortex). Results from the diagnosis process compared with the ground truth show that physicians were able to categorize different levels of AD using the sonification generated in this study with higher accuracy than using a standard diagnosis procedure, based on the visualization alone.