Speech-Based Parkinson’s Detection Using Pre-Trained Self-Supervised Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) Models and Supervised Contrastive Learning

Diagnosing Parkinson’s disease (PD) through speech analysis is a promising area of research, as speech impairments are often one of the early signs of the disease. This study investigates the efficacy of fine-tuning pre-trained Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models, specifically Wav2Vec 2.0 and HuBERT, for PD detection using transfer learning. These models, pre-trained on large unlabeled datasets, can be capable of learning rich speech representations that capture acoustic markers of PD. The study also proposes the integration of a supervised contrastive (SupCon) learning approach to enhance the models’ ability to distinguish PD-specific features. Additionally, the proposed ASR-based features were compared against two common acoustic feature sets: mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) and the extended Geneva minimalistic acoustic parameter set (eGeMAPS) as a baseline. We also employed a gradient-based method, Grad-CAM, to visualize important speech regions contributing to the models’ predictions. The experiments, conducted using the NeuroVoz dataset, demonstrated that features extracted from the pre-trained ASR models exhibited superior performance compared to the baseline features. The results also reveal that the method integrating SupCon consistently outperforms traditional cross-entropy (CE)-based models. Wav2Vec 2.0 and HuBERT with SupCon achieved the highest F1 scores of 90.0% and 88.99%, respectively. Additionally, their AUC scores in the ROC analysis surpassed those of the CE models, which had comparatively lower AUCs, ranging from 0.84 to 0.89. These results highlight the potential of ASR-based models as scalable, non-invasive tools for diagnosing and monitoring PD, offering a promising avenue for the early detection and management of this debilitating condition.