Deep language space neural network for classifying mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer-type dementia

It has been quite a challenge to diagnose Mild Cognitive Impairment due to Alzheimer’s disease (MCI) and Alzheimer-type dementia (AD-type dementia) using the currently available clinical diagnostic criteria and neuropsychological examinations. As such we propose an automated diagnostic technique using a variant of deep neural networks language models (DNNLM) on the verbal utterances of affected individuals. Motivated by the success of DNNLM on natural language tasks, we propose a combination of deep neural network and deep language models (D2NNLM) for classifying the disease. Results on the DementiaBank language transcript clinical dataset show that D2NNLM sufficiently learned several linguistic biomarkers in the form of higher order n-grams to distinguish the affected group from the healthy group with reasonable accuracy on very sparse clinical datasets.