Jan Rusz

Czech Technical University in Prague | ČVUT · Faculty of Electrical Engineering (FEL)

The purpose of this study was to analyze vowel articulation across various speaking tasks in a group of 20 early Parkinson's disease (PD) individuals prior to pharmacotherapy. Vowels were extracted from sustained phonation, sentence repetition, reading passage, and monologue. Acoustic analysis was based upon measures of the first (F1) and second (F...

To assist other eye movement investigators in the design and analysis of their studies. We examined basic saccadic eye movements and smooth pursuit in the horizontal and vertical directions with video-oculography in a group of 145 healthy subjects between 19 and 82years of age. Gender and education level did not influence eye movement metrics. With...

Although speech motor changes are reported as a common sign of Huntington's disease (HD), the most prominent signs of voice dysfunction remain unknown. The aim of the current study was to explore specific changes in phonatory function in subjects with HD. 34 subjects with HD and 34 age- and sex-matched healthy controls were examined. Participants p...

Despite the initial reports showing beneficial effects of dopaminergic treatment on speech in Parkinson's disease (PD), more recent studies based upon valid measurements have not approved any improvement of speech performance under pharmacotherapy. The aim of this study was to analyze the effect of treatment initiation on the progression of speech...

An assessment of vocal impairment is presented for separating healthy people from persons with early untreated Parkinson's disease (PD). This study's main purpose was to (a) determine whether voice and speech disorder are present from early stages of PD before starting dopaminergic pharmacotherapy, (b) ascertain the specific characteristics of the...

Parkinson’s disease (PD) and essential tremor (ET) are prevalent movement disorders that mainly affect elderly people, presenting diagnostic challenges due to shared clinical features. While both disorders exhibit distinct speech patterns—hypokinetic dysarthria in PD and hyperkinetic dysarthria in ET—the efficacy of speech assessment for differenti...

Objective This study assessed the relationship between speech and language impairment and outcome in a multicenter cohort of isolated/idiopathic rapid eye movement sleep behavior disorder (iRBD). Methods Patients with iRBD from 7 centers speaking Czech, English, German, French, and Italian languages underwent a detailed speech assessment at baseli...

Speech traits have enabled the evaluation and monitoring of the neurological state of different disorders, including Parkinson’s Disease (PD) using classical and deep approaches. Considering that speech contains paralinguistic information, the native language of the speaker influences the performance of the trained models when classifying the prese...

Purpose: Although articulatory impairment represents distinct speech characteristics in most neurological diseases affecting movement, methods allowing automated assessments of articulation deficits from the connected speech are scarce. This study aimed to design a fully automated method for analyzing dysarthria-related vowel articulation impairme...

Background Impairment of higher language functions associated with natural spontaneous speech in multiple sclerosis (MS) remains underexplored. Objectives We presented a fully automated method for discriminating MS patients from healthy controls based on lexical and syntactic linguistic features. Methods We enrolled 120 MS individuals with Expand...

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a neurological disorder impacting a person's speech. Among automatic PD assessment methods, deep learning models have gained particular interest. Recently, the community has explored cross-pathology and cross-language models which can improve diagnostic accuracy even further. However, strict patient data privacy regulati...

Background: Symmetric biphasic pulses have been shown to acutely increase the therapeutic window of ventralis intermedius deep brain stimulation (Vim-DBS) for essential tremor (ET) compared to cathodic pulses. Acute supratherapeutic stimulation can induce ataxic side effects in Vim-DBS. Objective: To investigate the effect on tremor, ataxia and...

Background: Motor skills in children have traditionally been examined via challenging speech tasks such as syllable repetition, and calculating the syllabic rate using a stopwatch or by inspecting the oscillogram followed by a laborious comparison of the scores on a look-up table representing the typical performances of children of the given age a...

Aim To investigate the presence and relationship of temporal speech and gait parameters in patients with postural instability/gait disorder (PIGD) and tremor‐dominant (TD) motor subtypes of Parkinson's disease (PD). Methods Speech samples and instrumented walkway system assessments were acquired from a total of 60 de‐novo PD patients (40 in TD and...

Background: Motor speech alterations are a prominent feature of clinically manifest Huntington disease (HD). Objective acoustic analysis of speech can quantify speech alterations. It is currently unknown, however, at what stage of HD speech alterations can be reliably detected. Aim: We explored patterns and extent of speech alterations using obj...

Purpose This study aimed to evaluate whether long-term averaged spectrum (LTAS) descriptors for reading and monologue are suitable to detect worsening of dysarthria in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) treated with subthalamic nucleus deep brain stimulation (STN-DBS) with potential effect of ON and OFF stimulation conditions and types of conne...

Imprecise vowels represent a common deficit associated with hypokinetic dysarthria resulting from a reduced articulatory range of motion in Parkinson’s disease (PD). It is not yet unknown whether the vowel articulation impairment is already evident in the prodromal stages of synucleinopathy. We aimed to assess whether vowel articulation abnormaliti...

While speech disorder represents an early and prominent clinical feature of atypical parkinsonian syndromes such as multiple system atrophy (MSA) and progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP), little is known about the sensitivity of speech assessment as a potential diagnostic tool. Speech samples were acquired from 215 subjects, including 25 MSA, 20 PS...

Background In patients with Huntington disease (HD), subtle alterations in speech rate and timing may precede the more characteristic motor signs, such as chorea. Aims We studied oral diadochokinesis (DDK) using alternating (AMR) and sequential (SMR) syllable repetition tasks in manifest HD patients and explored the effect of antidopaminergic medi...

Background Respiratory function deteriorates markedly in patients with Huntington disease (HD) over the course of the disease. However, it remains unclear, how early the first breathing abnormalities become apparent. Aims This study aimed to investigate breathing patterns during speech in early and moderate HD. Methods Different measures of respi...

Background: Patients with synucleinopathies frequently display language abnormalities. However, whether patients with isolated rapid eye movement sleep behavior disorder (iRBD) have prodromal language impairment remains unknown. Objective: We examined whether the linguistic abnormalities in iRBD can serve as potential biomarkers for conversion t...

Background An early diagnosis together with an accurate disease progression monitoring of multiple sclerosis is an important component of successful disease management. Prior studies have established that multiple sclerosis is correlated with speech discrepancies. Early research using objective acoustic measurements has discovered measurable dysart...

Even though hypomimia is a hallmark of Parkinson’s disease (PD), objective and easily interpretable tools to capture the disruption of spontaneous and deliberate facial movements are lacking. This study aimed to develop a fully automatic video-based hypomimia assessment tool and estimate the prevalence and characteristics of hypomimia in de-novo PD...

Introduction Early identification of Parkinson’s disease (PD) in its prodromal stage has fundamental implications for the future development of neuroprotective therapies. However, no sufficiently accurate biomarkers of prodromal PD are currently available to facilitate early identification. The vocal assessment of patients with isolated rapid eye m...

Purpose This study aimed to evaluate the reliability of different approaches for estimating the articulation rates in connected speech of Parkinsonian patients with different stages of neurodegeneration compared to healthy controls. Method Monologues and reading passages were obtained from 25 patients with idiopathic rapid eye movement sleep behav...

The effect of dopaminergic medication on speech has rarely been examined in early-stage Parkinson’s disease (PD) and the respective literature is inconclusive and limited by inappropriate design with lack of PD control group. The study aims to examine the short-term effect of dopaminergic medication on speech in PD using patients with good motor re...

Background: Sialic acid-protein interactions are involved in regulating central nervous system immunity; therefore, derangements in sialylation could be involved in neurodegeneration. Objectives: We evaluate the differences in serum transferrin sialylation in prodromal and early-stage Parkinson's disease (PD), its relation to substantia nigra de...

Although the cepstral peak prominence (CPP) and its variant, the cepstral peak prominence smooth (CPPS), are considered to be robust acoustic measures for the evaluation of dysphonia, whether they are sensitive to capture early voice changes in Parkinson's disease (PD) has not yet been explored. This study aimed to investigate the voice changes via...

Background: Impairments of olfactory and speech function are likely early prodromal symptoms of α-synucleinopathy. Objective: The aim of this study is to assess whether dysprosody is present in isolated rapid eye movement sleep behavior disorder (iRBD) with hyposmia/anosmia and a normal nigrostriatal system. Methods: Pitch variability during s...

Substantial variability and severity of dysarthric patterns across Parkinson’s disease (PD) patients may reflect distinct phenotypic differences. We aimed to compare patterns of speech disorder in early-onset PD (EOPD) and late-onset PD (LOPD) in drug-naive patients at early stages of disease. Speech samples were acquired from a total of 96 partici...

Background and objectives: Patterns of speech disorder in Parkinson's disease (PD), that are highly variable across individual patients, were not systematically studied. Our aim was to identify speech subtypes in treatment-naïve PD patients and examine their response to long-term dopaminergic therapy. Methods: We recorded speech data from a tota...

Background: An early diagnosis together with an accurate disease progression monitoring of multiple sclerosis is an important component of successful disease management. Prior studies have established that multiple sclerosis is correlated with speech discrepancies. Early research using objective acoustic measurements has discovered measurable dysar...

Background The mechanisms underlying speech abnormalities in Parkinson's disease (PD) remain poorly understood, with most of the available evidence based on male patients. This study aimed to estimate the occurrence and characteristics of speech disorder in early, drug-naive PD patients with relation to gender and dopamine transporter imaging. Met...

Patients with isolated rapid-eye-movement sleep behaviour disorder (RBD) are commonly regarded as being in the early stages of a progressive neurodegenerative disease involving α-synuclein pathology, such as Parkinson's disease, dementia with Lewy bodies, or multiple system atrophy. Abnormal α-synuclein deposition occurs early in the neurodegenerat...

Little is known about the minimum sample length required for the stable acoustic assessment of speech in Parkinson's disease (PD). This study aimed to investigate the effect of the duration of the reading passage on the determination of reliable acoustic patterns in individuals with PD treated with subthalamic nucleus deep brain stimulation. A phon...

Objective This multi‐language study employed simple speech recording and high‐end pattern analysis to provide sensitive and reliable non‐invasive biomarkers of prodromal vs. manifest alpha‐synucleinopathy in patients with idiopathic rapid eye movement sleep behaviour disorder (iRBD) and early‐stage Parkinson's disease (PD). Methods We performed a...

Patients suffering from neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson’s or Huntington’s disease exhibit speech impairments that affect their communication capabilities. The automatic assessment of the speech of the patients allows to develop computer aided tools to support the diagnosis and to evaluate the disease severity, which helps clinicians t...

Background Gait disturbances have emerged as some of the main therapeutic concerns in late-stage Parkinson’s disease (PD) treated with dopaminergic therapy and deep brain stimulation (DBS). External cues may help to overcome freezing of gait (FOG) and improve some of the gait parameters. Aim To evaluate the effect of 3D visual cues and STN-DBS on...

Most patients with movement disorders have speech impairments resulting from sensorimotor abnormalities that affect phonatory, articulatory, and prosodic speech subsystems. There is widespread cross‐discipline use of speech recordings for diagnostic and research purposes, despite which there are no specific guidelines for a standardized method. Thi...

Embodied cognition research on Parkinson's disease (PD) points to disruptions of frontostriatal language functions as sensitive targets for clinical assessment. However, no existing approach has been tested for crosslinguistic validity, let alone by combining naturalistic tasks with machine-learning tools. To address these issues, we conducted the...

Purpose The purpose of this research note is to provide a performance comparison of available algorithms for the automated evaluation of oral diadochokinesis using speech samples from patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Method Four different algorithms based on a wide range of signal processing approaches were tested on a sequential...

Hypokinetic dysarthria is a multidimensional impairment affecting all main speech subsystems with variable patterns and severity across individual Parkinson's disease (PD) patients. We can thus assume that inter-individual abnormal speech patterns are related to the various clinical subtypes of PD with different prominent motor symptoms. The aim of...

Background Idiopathic rapid eye movement sleep behaviour (iRBD) is considered as a risk factor for Parkinson's disease (PD) development. Evaluation of repetitive movements with finger tapping, which serves as a principal task to measure the extent of bradykinesia in PD, may undercover potential PD patients. The aim of this study was to explore whet...

Clear speech refers to intentionally modifying conversational speech to maximise intelligibility. This study aimed to compare the speech behaviour of patients with progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP), multiple system atrophy (MSA) and Parkinson's disease (PD) under conversational and clear speech conditions to gain greater pathophysiological insig...

Measuring the fundamental frequency of the vocal folds F0 is recognized as an important parameter in the assessment of speech impairments in Parkinson`s disease (PD). Although a number of F0 trackers currently exist, their performance in smartphone-based evaluation and robustness against background noise have never been tested. Monologues from 30 n...

As dysphonia is assumed to be the most prevalent feature of hypokinetic dysarthria in Parkinson’s disease (PD), several acoustic approaches have been introduced for its assessment. However, the sensitivity of different acoustic measures to the occurrence of dysphonia in drug-naïve de-novo patients with PD has not yet been explored. The goal of this...

In the above article [1] , the name of the first author was misspelled. The correct name is Kriss Rozenstoks.

Background The relevance of formant-based measures has been noted across a spectrum of medical, technical, and linguistic applications. Therefore, the primary aim of the study was to evaluate the effect of ageing on vowel articulation, as the previous research revealed contradictory findings. The secondary aim was to provide normative acoustic data...

Parkinson's disease patients develop different speech impairments that affect their communication capabilities. The automatic assessment of the speech of the patients allows the development of computer aided tools to support the diagnosis and the evaluation of the disease severity. This paper introduces a methodology to classify Parkinson's disease...

Objective: Voice tremor represents a common but frequently overlooked clinical feature of neurological disease. Therefore, we aimed to quantitatively and objectively assess the characteristics of voice tremor in a large sample of patients with various progressive neurological diseases. Methods: Voice samples were acquired from 240 patients with...

Backgrounds: This study aims to characterize eye movement abnormalities in Wilson disease and examine their association with the degree of brainstem atrophy. Methods: Twenty patients (10 males, mean age 46.8, SD 8.9 years) with genetically confirmed neurological WD on stable anti-copper treatment and 20 age- and sex-matched healthy subjects were...

The aim of this study was to evaluate associations of motor and non-motor symptoms with dopamine transporter binding in prodromal stage of synucleinopathies. We examined 74 patients with idiopathic REM sleep behavior disorder (RBD), which is a prodromal synucleinopathy, and 39 controls using Movement Disorders Society-Unified Parkinson’s Disease Ra...

Parkinson’s disease patients develop different speech impairments that affect their communication capabilities. The automatic assessment of the speech of the patients allows the development of computer aided tools to support the diagnosis and the evaluation of the disease severity. This paper introduces a methodology to classify Parkinson’s disease...

The prominent and early presence of dysphonia is considered a valuable marker for differentiation of idiopathic Parkinson’s disease and parkinsonian syndromes. Objective quantification of vibrational regimes represented by modal and subharmonic vibrations may thus be vital for improving accuracy of diagnostic decision. The rationale for analyzing v...

Slow and irregular oral diadochokinesis represents an important manifestation of spastic and ataxic dysarthria in multiple sclerosis (MS). We aimed to develop a robust algorithm based on convolutional neural networks for the accurate detection of syllables from different types of alternating motion rate (AMR) and sequential motion rate (SMR) paradi...

Although dysarthria is a common pattern in multiple sclerosis (MS), the contribution of specific brain areas to key factors of dysarthria remains unknown. Speech data were acquired from 123 MS patients with Expanded Disability Status Scale (EDSS) ranging from 1 to 6.5 and 60 matched healthy controls. Results of computerized acoustic analyses of sub...

Although motor speech disorders represent an early and prominent clinical feature of multiple system atrophy (MSA), the potential usefulness of speech assessment as a diagnostic tool has not yet been explored. This cross-sectional study aimed to provide a comprehensive, objective description of motor speech function in the parkinsonian (MSA-P) and...

Gait impairment is one of the common manifestations of multiple sclerosis (MS) and contributes to a loss of quality of life. Natalizumab, an anti-α4 integrin monoclonal antibody, has been shown to have an effect in treatment of MS, reducing relapses and inflammatory lesions. Aim of our study was to assess how patients perceive gait impairment over...

A link to the full-text article: https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1ZB3J3S0FSfsz4 Background: Impairment of cognition and speech are common in multiple sclerosis (MS) patients, but their relationship is not well understood. Objective: To describe the relationship between articulation rate characteristics and processing speed and to investigate the...

Parkinsonism refers to Parkinson's Disease (PD) and Atyp-ical Parkinsonian Syndromes (APS), such as Progressive Supranuclear Palsy (PSP) and Multiple System Atrophy (MSA). Discrimination between PD and APS and within APS groups in early disease stages is a very challenging task. Interestingly, speech disorder is frequently an early and prominent cl...

Literature evidences the existence of hypokinetic dysarthria in parkinsonian patients and, consequently, the objective characterization of the dysarthric signs associated to the articulatory aspect of speech can be used to detect Parkinson's Disease (PD) providing clinicians with new tools to support the clinical diagnosis. However, no work has an...

Pallidal deep-brain stimulation of the internal globus pallidus (GPi-DBS) is an effective treatment for dystonia. However, GPi-DBS may cause important stimulation-induced side effects such as hypokinetic dysarthria, which is particularly manifested by articulation rate abnormalities. However, little data regarding the effect of the location of the...

Background Postural and gait instability in Huntington’s disease (HD) is an essential part of the motor symptomatology causing falls which contribute to morbidity and mortality. Rehabilitation (RHB) is considered beneficial in postural and gait stability treatment. Aims We aimed to evaluate the short- and long-term effects of an inpatient multidis...

The use of new tools to detect Parkinson's Disease (PD) from speech articulatory movements can have a considerable impact in the diagnosis of patients. In this study, a novel approach involving speaker recognition techniques with allophonic distillation is proposed and tested separately in four parkinsonian speech databases (205 patients and 186 co...

Introduction/Background Postural and gait instability in Huntington's disease (HD) is an essential part of the motor symptomatology causing falls contributing to morbidity and mortality. Rehabilitation (Rhb) is considered beneficial in stability treatment. However, the number of studies is still limited. This is the first multidisciplinary inpatien...

Although smartphone technology provides new opportunities for the recording of speech samples in everyday life, its ability to capture prodromal speech impairment in persons at high risk of developing Parkinsons disease (PD) has never been investigated. Speech data were acquired through a smartphone as well as a professional microphone with linear...

Head tremor is a common clinical manifestation in essential tremor (ET) and can also occur as dystonic tremor (DT) in cervical dystonia. The clinical differentiation of head tremor due to ET and DT is not easy. Therefore, we developed instrumental methods using an accelerometer and an optical motion capture system to precisely measure and analyze h...

Rapid eye movement (REM) sleep behavior disorder (RBD) is characterized by repeated episodes of REM sleep-related vocalizations and/or complex motor behaviors. Definite diagnosis of RBD is based on history and polysomnography, both of which are less accessible due to the lack of trained specialists and high cost. While RBD may be associated with di...

Background: Although pallidal deep brain stimulation (GPi-DBS) is an effective treatment for dystonia, it may cause important stimulation-induced side-effects such as hypokinetic dysarthria or stuttering. However, the reasons behind the occurrence of these side-effects remain unknown. Objective: To objectively investigate the impact of GPi-DBS o...

For generations, the evaluation of speech abnormalities in neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson’s disease (PD) has been limited to perceptual tests or user-controlled laboratory analysis based upon rather small samples of human vocalizations. Our study introduces a fully automated method that yields significant features related to respirat...

Background: Motor speech disorders in multiple sclerosis (MS) are poorly understood and their quantitative, objective acoustic characterization remains limited. Additionally, little data regarding relationships between the severity of speech disorders and neurological involvement in MS, as well as the contribution of pyramidal and cerebellar funct...

Disturbances of the gamma-aminobutyric-acid (GABA) system have been suspected of contributing to the pathophysiology of progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP). The ability to rapidly resolve competitive action decisions, such as shifting the gaze to one particular stimulus rather than another, can be predicted by the concentration of GABA in the regi...

It is currently unknown whether speech and limb motor effectors in Parkinson’s disease (PD) are controlled by similar underlying brain processes. Based on computerized objective analysis, the aim of this study was to evaluate potential correlation between speech and mechanical tests of upper limb motor function. Speech and upper limb motor tests we...

Distinct speech characteristics that may aid in differentiation between Parkinson’s disease (PD), progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP) and multiple system atrophy (MSA) remain tremendously under-explored. Here, the patterns and degree of consonant articulation deficits across voiced and voiceless stop plosives in 16 PD, 16 PSP, 16 MSA and 16 health...

Recently, based on voice cepstral analysis, Benba et al. (IEEE T. Neur. Sys. Reh., vol. 24, pp. 1100-1108, 2016) have reported discrimination between patients with Parkinson’s disease and different neurological disorders with high classification accuracy up to 90%. Using the same approach, we were able to experimentally separate two groups of norma...

Background Although increased nasality can originate from basal ganglia dysfunction, data regarding hypernasality in Parkinson’s disease (PD) and Huntington’s disease (HD) are very sparse. The aim of the current study was to analyze acoustic and perceptual correlates of velopharyngeal seal closure in 37 PD and 37 HD participants in comparison to 37...

Introduction Deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the globus pallidus interna (GPi) used in treatment of pharmacoresistant dystonic syndromes is potentially accompanied by several side effects including disorders of speech. Stuttering-like dysfluencies appeared with basal ganglia dysfunction and were occasionally reported as a consequence of GPi DBS in...