Storyteller in ADNI4: Application of an early Alzheimer's disease screening tool using brief, remote, and speech‐based testing

Abstract

INTRODUCTION: Speech-based testing shows promise for sensitive and scalable objective screening for Alzheimer's disease (AD), but research to date offers limited evidence of generalizability. METHODS: Data were taken from the AMYPRED (Amyloid Prediction in Early Stage Alzheimer's Disease from Acoustic and Linguistic Patterns of Speech) studies (N = 101, N = 46 mild cognitive impairment [MCI]) and Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative 4 (ADNI4) remote digital (N = 426, N = 58 self-reported MCI, mild AD or dementia) and in-clinic (N = 57, N = 13 MCI) cohorts, in which participants provided audio-recorded responses to automated remote story recall tasks in the Storyteller test battery. Text similarity, lexical, temporal, and acoustic speech feature sets were extracted. Models predicting early AD were developed in AMYPRED and tested out of sample in the demographically more diverse cohorts in ADNI4 (> 33% from historically underrepresented populations). RESULTS: Speech models generalized well to unseen data in ADNI4 remote and in-clinic cohorts. The best-performing models evaluated text-based metrics (text similarity, lexical features: area under the curve 0.71-0.84 across cohorts). DISCUSSION: Speech-based predictions of early AD from Storyteller generalize across diverse samples. HIGHLIGHTS: The Storyteller speech-based test is an objective digital prescreener for Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative 4 (ADNI4). Speech-based models predictive of Alzheimer's disease (AD) were developed in the AMYPRED (Amyloid Prediction in Early Stage Alzheimer's Disease from Acoustic and Linguistic Patterns of Speech) sample (N = 101). Models were tested out of sample in ADNI4 in-clinic (N = 57) and remote (N = 426) cohorts. Models showed good generalization out of sample. Models evaluating text matching and lexical features were most predictive of early AD.