Artificial Intelligence and Pattern Recognition Methods for the Automatic Detection and Evaluation of Neurological Disorders, 3rd Edition

A special issue of Diagnostics (ISSN 2075-4418). This special issue belongs to the section "Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence in Diagnostics".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 October 2026 | Viewed by 763

Special Issue Editor


E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
1. GITA Lab, Faculty of Engineering, University of Antioquia, Medellín, Colombia
2. LME Laboratory, University of Erlangen, 91054 Erlangen, Germany
Interests: computer science; artificial intelligence; signals processing; biomedical engineering; speech processing
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue focuses on novel studies about neurodegeneration, which is a major problem worldwide. It is estimated that about 50 million people suffer from neurodegenerative diseases, and this number is expected to increase to 115 million by 2050. This Special Issue is focused on contributions addressing two of the main challenges in studying neurodegeneration: (i) diagnosis and (ii) monitoring.

The development of modern methods in machine learning and pattern recognition has enabled the possibility of performing accurate and non-intrusive detection and monitoring of different diseases, considering different sources of information, including speech production, language, movement, gait, handwriting, video, neural activity (EEG and electroenvephalography), and others. The use of information from these biosignals together with the development of classical and/or modern machine learning and deep learning algorithms is welcomed.

This Special Issue will focus on, but is not limited to, the following topics:

  • Classical and modern machine learning methods to detect and monitor neurodegenerative diseases;
  • Methods to classify different neurodegenerative diseases;
  • Monitoring of disease progression;
  • Evaluation of different treatment strategies, e.g., medication intake, therapy, and others;
  • Non-intrusive evaluation and monitoring of neurodegenerative disorders.

Prof. Dr. Juan Orozco-Arroyave
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Diagnostics is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • machine learning
  • neurodegenerative diseases
  • diagnosis
  • detection and evaluation
  • monitoring

Benefits of Publishing in a Special Issue

  • Ease of navigation: Grouping papers by topic helps scholars navigate broad scope journals more efficiently.
  • Greater discoverability: Special Issues support the reach and impact of scientific research. Articles in Special Issues are more discoverable and cited more frequently.
  • Expansion of research network: Special Issues facilitate connections among authors, fostering scientific collaborations.
  • External promotion: Articles in Special Issues are often promoted through the journal's social media, increasing their visibility.
  • Reprint: MDPI Books provides the opportunity to republish successful Special Issues in book format, both online and in print.

Further information on MDPI's Special Issue policies can be found here.

Published Papers (1 paper)

Order results
Result details
Select all
Export citation of selected articles as:

Research

15 pages, 3161 KB  
Article
On the Suitability of Data Augmentation Techniques to Improve Parkinson’s Disease Detection with Speech Recordings
by Cristian David Ríos-Urrego, Tulio Andrés Ruiz-Romero, David Puerta-Lotero, Daniel Escobar-Grisales and Juan Rafael Orozco-Arroyave
Diagnostics 2026, 16(3), 498; https://doi.org/10.3390/diagnostics16030498 - 6 Feb 2026
Viewed by 564
Abstract
Background: Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disorder that affects millions of people worldwide. Speech analysis has emerged as a non-invasive tool for automatic PD detection; however, the scarcity and homogeneity of available datasets often limit the generalization capability of machine learning models, [...] Read more.
Background: Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disorder that affects millions of people worldwide. Speech analysis has emerged as a non-invasive tool for automatic PD detection; however, the scarcity and homogeneity of available datasets often limit the generalization capability of machine learning models, motivating the use of data augmentation strategies to improve robustness. Methods: This study presents a data augmentation-based methodology for speech-based classification between PD patients and healthy control subjects. A deep learning model trained from scratch on Mel spectrograms is evaluated using augmentation techniques applied at both the waveform and time–frequency levels. Multiple training and model selection strategies are analyzed and model performance is assessed through internal validation as well as using an independent dataset Results: Experimental results show that carefully selected data augmentation techniques improve classification performance with respect to the non-augmented counterpart, achieving gains of up to 3% in accuracy. However, when evaluated on an independent dataset, these improvements do not consistently translate into better generalization. Conclusions: These findings demonstrate that, while data augmentation can effectively enhance model performance within a single dataset, this apparent robustness is not sufficient to guarantee generalization on independent speech corpora for PD detection. Full article
Show Figures

Figure 1

Back to TopTop