- For dementia screening and monitoring, standardized tests play
a key role in clinical routine since they aim at minimizing subjectivity by measuring performance on a variety of cognitive
tasks. In this paper, we report a study consisting of a semistandardized history taking followed by two standardized neuropsychological tests, namely the SKT and the CERAD-NB.
The tests include basic tasks such as naming objects, learning
word lists, but also widely used tools such as the MMSE. Most
of the tasks are performed verbally and should thus be suitable
for automated scoring based on transcripts. For the first batch
of 30 patients, we analyze the correlation between expert manual evaluations and automatic evaluations based on manual and
automatic transcriptions. For both SKT and CERAD-NB, we
observe high to perfect correlations using manual transcripts;
for certain tasks with lower correlation, the automatic scoring is
stricter than the human reference since it is limited to the audio.
Using automatic transcriptions, correlationsFor dementia screening and monitoring, standardized tests play
a key role in clinical routine since they aim at minimizing subjectivity by measuring performance on a variety of cognitive
tasks. In this paper, we report a study consisting of a semistandardized history taking followed by two standardized neuropsychological tests, namely the SKT and the CERAD-NB.
The tests include basic tasks such as naming objects, learning
word lists, but also widely used tools such as the MMSE. Most
of the tasks are performed verbally and should thus be suitable
for automated scoring based on transcripts. For the first batch
of 30 patients, we analyze the correlation between expert manual evaluations and automatic evaluations based on manual and
automatic transcriptions. For both SKT and CERAD-NB, we
observe high to perfect correlations using manual transcripts;
for certain tasks with lower correlation, the automatic scoring is
stricter than the human reference since it is limited to the audio.
Using automatic transcriptions, correlations drop as expected
and are related to recognition accuracy; however, we still observe high correlations of up to 0.98 (SKT) and 0.85 (CERADNB). We show that using word alternatives helps to mitigate
recognition errors and subsequently improves correlation with
expert scores.…

