A Novel CustNetGC Boosted Model with Spectral Features for Parkinson's Disease Prediction

Parkinson's disease is a neurodegenerative disorder that can be very tricky to diagnose and treat. Such early symptoms can include tremors, wheezy breathing, and changes in voice quality as critical indicators of neural damage. Notably, there has been growing interest in utilizing changes in vocal attributes as markers for the detection of PD early on. Based on this understanding, the present paper was designed to focus on the acoustic feature analysis based on voice recordings of patients diagnosed with PD and healthy controls (HC). In this paper, we introduce a novel classification and visualization model known as CustNetGC, combining a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) with Custom Network Grad-CAM and CatBoost to enhance the efficiency of PD diagnosis. We use a publicly available dataset from Figshare, including voice recordings of 81 participants: 40 patients with PD and 41 healthy controls. From these recordings, we extracted the key spectral features: L-mHP and Spectral Slopes. The L-mHP feature combines three spectrogram representations: Log-Mel spectrogram, harmonic spectrogram, and percussive spectrogram, which are derived using Harmonic-Percussive Source Separation (HPSS). Grad-CAM was used to highlight the important regions in the data, thus making the PD predictions interpretable and effective. Our proposed CustNetGC model achieved an accuracy of 99.06% and precision of 95.83%, with the area under the ROC curve (AUC) recorded at 0.90 for the PD class and 0.89 for the HC class. Additionally, the combination of CatBoost, a gradient boosting algorithm, enhanced the robustness and the prediction performance by properly classifying PD and non-PD samples. Therefore, the results provide the potential improvement in the CustNetGC system in enhancing diagnostic accuracy and the interpretability of the Parkinson's Disease prediction model.