在COPD筛查中分离语音与年龄的影响

中文摘要 AI 辅助

语音已被提出作为慢性阻塞性肺疾病（COPD）低成本筛查的信号。COPD与年龄密切相关，且语音会随年龄变化，因此该结果存在一个无关的替代解释。我们在严格的参与者级别协议下重新评估了一个公开的持续发声语料库（1246条录音，68名参与者），对反复抽取的年龄匹配队列进行评估，并报告混杂因素本身在这些队列上实现的区分度。原始（未建模）年龄的ROC-AUC为0.510（95%置信区间[0.469, 0.551]），原始性别为0.479，均处于随机水平；排除年龄的声学模型的ROC-AUC为0.717（95%置信区间[0.552, 0.859]），平均精度为0.747（95%置信区间[0.581, 0.892]），而包含年龄的模型则降至0.531至0.679。该分离结果由另外两个具有固定超参数的学习器复现。两项发现具有更广泛的方法论意义：与未使用年龄训练的相同模型相比，使用年龄训练的模型向年龄平衡的目标队列迁移效果更差；14项经典语音质量与扰动指标可实现与55维组合表示相当的区分度。我们得出结论：存在非年龄相关的声学信号，无法排除发布的特征中存在记录条件的混杂，且标准使用的评估协议无法区分这些可能性。

英文摘要

Voice has been proposed as a low-cost screening signal for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). COPD is strongly age-associated and voice changes with age, thus such results admit a trivial alternative explanation. We re-evaluate a public sustained-phonation corpus ($1246$ recordings, $68$ participants) under a strictly participant-level protocol. We therefore evaluate on repeatedly drawn age-matched cohorts and report the discrimination achieved by the confounders themselves on those same cohorts. Where raw (unmodelled) age ($0.510$ $[0.469, 0.551]$) and raw gender ($0.479$) are both measured at chance, acoustic models excluding age retain ROC-AUC $0.717$ $[0.552, 0.859]$ and average precision $0.747$ $[0.581, 0.892]$ against a one-to-one baseline of $0.5$, whereas models containing age fall to $0.531$--$0.679$. The separation is reproduced by two further learners with fixed hyperparameters. Two findings have broader methodological implications: models trained with age transfer less effectively to an age-balanced target cohort than otherwise identical models trained without age, and fourteen classical voice-quality and perturbation measures achieve comparable discrimination to a $55$-dimensional combined representation. We conclude that a non-age acoustic signal is present, that confounding by recording conditions cannot be excluded from the released features, and that the evaluation protocol in standard use cannot distinguish these possibilities.

发表机构

• University of Crete（克里特大学）

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