Roshan Prakash Rane

Serli Kopar, Roshan Prakash Rane, Christian Mychajliw et al.

This study examines the relationship between speech representations and the hierarchical structure of cognitive assessment in mild cognitive impairment. Utilizing 5,754 German neuropsychological assessment recordings, we evaluate six cognitive tasks across three score levels: task, domain, and global levels. We compare hand-crafted acoustic features with self-supervised learning (SSL) embeddings. Results show that although SSL representations generally outperform hand-crafted features at lower levels, this trend reverses for MCI classification. Furthermore, task-specific constraints influence performance: tasks with greater response freedom exhibit performance dilution as hierarchical levels increase, suggesting ``specialist'' representations, whereas the performance of highly structured tasks increases toward higher levels, suggesting ``generalist'' representations. These findings show links between task constraints and assessment hierarchy in automated clinical speech analysis.

Roshan Prakash Rane, JiHoon Kim, Arjun Umesha et al.

Deep Learning (DL) models have gained popularity in neuroimaging studies for predicting psychological behaviors, cognitive traits, and brain pathologies. However, these models can be biased by confounders such as age, sex, or imaging artifacts from the acquisition process. To address this, we introduce 'DeepRepViz', a two-part framework designed to identify confounders in DL model predictions. The first component is a visualization tool that can be used to qualitatively examine the final latent representation of the DL model. The second component is a metric called 'Con-score' that quantifies the confounder risk associated with a variable, using the final latent representation of the DL model. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the Con-score using a simple simulated setup by iteratively altering the strength of a simulated confounder and observing the corresponding change in the Con-score. Next, we validate the DeepRepViz framework on a large-scale neuroimaging dataset (n=12000) by performing three MRI-phenotype prediction tasks that include (a) predicting chronic alcohol users, (b) classifying participant sex, and (c) predicting performance speed on a cognitive task called 'trail making'. DeepRepViz identifies sex as a significant confounder in the DL model predicting chronic alcohol users (Con-score=0.35) and age as a confounder in the model predicting cognitive task performance (Con-score=0.3). In conclusion, the DeepRepViz framework provides a systematic approach to test for potential confounders such as age, sex, and imaging artifacts and improves the transparency of DL models for neuroimaging studies.