Diagnosing Parkinson’s Disease Using the Classification of Speech Signals

This paper addressees the problem of an early diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease by the classification of characteristic features of person’s voice. A new, two-step classification approach is proposed. In the first step, the voice samples are classified using standard state-of-the-art classifiers. In the second step, the classified samples are assigned to patients and the final classification process based on majority criterion is performed. The advantage of using our new approach is the resulting, reliable patientoriented medical diagnose. The proposed two-step method of classification allows also to deal with the variable number of voice samples gathered for every patient. Preliminary experiments revealed quite satisfactory classification accuracy obtained during the performed leave-one-out cross validation.