Comprehensive Summary
Diagnosing primary progressive aphasia (PPA) is difficult to diagnose even for experienced physicians and PPA leads to loss of speech and language, which are crucial functions for daily life. Participants were placed into groups of 10 based on different subtypes of progressive aphasia and different segments from two audiobooks were played in segments. While the subjects were listening to the audiobooks, linguistic features were derived and processed through a temporal response function using electroencephalography (EEG) and an ML-based classifier. An active electrode system was used at 25,000 Hz to generate an EEG, especially for theta and delta bands, which are important for speech processing and temporal response function (TRF) beta weights were used to analyze how the brain responds to stimuli (sound). The model was preprocessed and classified based on recall, precision, and F1 scores. Using these areas of interest, the EEG bands of frequency did not have an effect on the classification accuracy of PPA. However, TRF beta weights were proven to have significant contributions in diagnosing PPA and this proved to be more accurate than solely EEG data. The TRF biomarkers were successfully able to differentiate between subtypes in PPA, however, a diagnosis of PPA prior to differentiating between the subtypes has to have been made. Although a TRF model was able to diagnose between different subtypes of PPA, there needs to be more studies done not only using this data, but determining the best uses for TRF.
Outcomes and Implications
Research on TRF beta weights is important as it is useful to see how individuals respond to different stimuli and can help providers with diagnosis. Using AI models to process neural responses helps to generate an accurate and relatively faster response than being asked questions about one's conditions or using medical equipment that is out of date and doesn’t provide a lot of information. Recent improvements in technology are crucial for the field of medicine as diagnosis can start to be found for certain neurological disorders as long as there is a wide body of literature surrounding the mechanisms, drug delivery pathways, and how certain disorders affect the body. Having all of one’s senses is important to live a long and healthy life and with the potential use of technology in neuroscience, treatments can be discovered. However, this will take time as a lot of the brain has not been studied in depth and more technological advancements need to occur for scientists to understand functions of the brain.