The Role of Selected Speech Signal Characteristics in Discriminating Unipolar and Bipolar Disorders

Abstract

Objective:The objective of this study is to explore and enhance the diagnostic process of unipolar and bipolar disorders. The primary focus is on leveraging automated processes to improve the accuracy and accessibility of diagnosis. The study aims to introduce an audio corpus collected from patients diagnosed with these disorders, annotated using the Clinical Global Impressions Scale (CGI) by psychiatrists. Methods and procedures: Traditional diagnostic methods rely on the clinician’s expertise and consideration of co-existing mental disorders. However, this study proposes the implementation of automated processes in the diagnosis, providing quantitative measures and enabling prolonged observation of patients. The paper introduces a speech signal pipeline for CGI state classification, with a specific focus on selecting the most discriminative features. Acoustic features such as prosodies, MFCC, and LPC coefficients are examined in the study. The classification process utilizes common machine learning methods. Results: The results of the study indicate promising outcomes for the automated diagnosis of bipolar and unipolar disorders using the proposed speech signal pipeline. The audio corpus annotated with CGI by psychiatrists achieved a classification accuracy of 95% for the two-class classification. For the four- and seven-class classifications, the results were 77.3% and 73%, respectively, demonstrating the potential of the developed method in distinguishing different states of the disorders.