A Neurosymbolic Approach for Explainable Early Diagnosis of Alzheimer's Disease
Authors: Ranveer Singh, Pranuthi Tenali, Saurabh Mathur, Ameet Soni, Vaishali Phatak, Karla Lynch, Daniel Murman, Matthew Rizzo, +1 more
Organizations: The University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX · TU Darmstadt, Germany · Swarthmore College, PA · University of Nebraska Medical Center, NE
Identifying reliable Alzheimer's disease (AD) markers typically requires manual, labor-intensive transcription and expert analysis, limiting its scale. We introduce an automated pipeline that extracts qualitative knowledge about potential AD progression indicators directly from audio recordings of verbal fluency tests. Our method uses pretrained foundation models to process raw audio and extract clinically relevant variables to construct a Bayesian Network (BN); this BN is used to reason about the AD progression markers and infer their qualitative relationships. Our system successfully recovers known clinical knowledge and identifies novel relationships between linguistic markers.