Today is the first class of your new new four class set. JH will have his third class 2/17. We will begin class with a causal conversation. Our material today is about AI diagnosing illnesses. Please listen and follow the transcript.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
This radio program is, among other things, a demonstration of the complexity of the human voice. People convey messages by what they say and also the way they say it. And the voice may also help doctors to diagnose conditions. Dr. Yael Bensoussan directs the Health Voice Center at the University of South Florida.
YAEL BENSOUSSAN: When we talk about the human voice, we talk about the sound that the vocal cords make, sounds like E, the way that the vocal cords vibrate, but also the way we speak. And speech is the way we articulate the sound, the way the sound goes into what we call our resonators - the nose cavity, the mouth cavity - and the way we use our breathing to talk.
LEILA FADEL, HOST:
Dr. Bensoussan says the voice gives her clues to five main categories of conditions.
BENSOUSSAN: The first one is neurological disorders, like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, ALS. Then we have voice disorders, like laryngeal cancer. Then we have mood disorders. We know that we can find a lot of changes in voice in depression and mood disorders. Fourth categories is respiratory disorders. People with lung diseases can cough a different way. And then the last one is pediatric disorders, like autism and speech delays.
INSKEEP: So what do those variations sound like? Here's an example - a voice with vocal fold paralysis from the Voice Foundation at St. John's University.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: The blue spot is on the key again. How hard did he hit him?
FADEL: And here's the voice of someone with cancer in their larynx, also from the Voice Foundation at St. John's University.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: The blue spot is the key again. How hard did it hit him?
FADEL: And a voice of someone diagnosed with Parkinson's from a company called SpeechVive.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: When sunlight strikes rainbows in the air, they act like a prism and form a rainbow.
BENSOUSSAN: Somebody with Parkinson's disease not only has a lower voice so that usually the frequency of the voice is a little bit lower; the speed of the way they speak is a little bit lower, more monotonous.
FADEL: Now with funding from NIH, Dr. Bensoussan and her co-director on the project are attempting to build an app to help diagnose diseases by listening to the quality of someone's voice.
BENSOUSSAN: We're developing the database for researchers to have access and also the tool to capture the voice.
INSKEEP: Yeah. As more people upload their voices to this app and the database grows, the algorithm's disease detection accuracy may improve. The researchers plan to include many voices to ensure their data is reflective of the population.
BENSOUSSAN: Training an algorithm on a group of 30 white males that are all 70 years old is not going to give good accuracy. And that's why serving the remote communities and underserved communities - it's so important. We want to capture the voices of these people as well that are underrepresented to make sure that the tools we develop are applicable to them.
FADEL: So can an app like this replace a regular medical screening in the future? Dr. Bensoussan says, no. She says the app will only flag signs of disease.
BENSOUSSAN: A family doctor, for example, that's in a remote community could use our tools and record the voice of the patients, put in the history, and the app could say, there's a very high chance this is cancer, actually. You should definitely have them seen by an expert in a very timely manner.
INSKEEP: Of course, if you're giving clues about yourself through your voice, that does raise privacy concerns. So the doctor says they have a team of bioethicists on board.
BENSOUSSAN: We know that technology can do crazy things. So it's kind of our job and our responsibility to make sure we put boundaries to that.
INSKEEP: Dr. Bensoussan says with the help of other researchers, it should take around four years to develop a tool that can help doctors with diagnosis and screening.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)