Summary
Objectives:
Among the many clinical decisions that psychiatrists must make, assessment of a patient’s
risk of committing suicide is definitely among the most important, complex and demanding.
One of the authors reviewing his clinical experience observed that successful predictions
of suicidality were often based on the patient’s voice independent of content. The
voices of suicidal patients exhibited unique qualities, which distinguished them from
non-suicidal patients. In this study we investigated the discriminating power of lower
order mel-cepstral coefficients among suicidal, major depressed, and non-suicidal
patients.
Methods:
Our sample consisted of 10 near-term suicidal patients, 10 major depressed patients,
and 10 non-depressed control subjects. Gaussian mixtures were employed to model the
class distributions of the extracted features.
Results and Conclusions:
As a result of two-sample ML classification analyses, first four mel-cepstral coefficients
yielded exceptional classification performance with correct classification scores
of 80% between near-term suicidal patients and non-depressed controls, 75% between
depressed patients and non-depressed controls, and 80% between near-term suicidal
patients and depressed patients.
Keywords
Suicide - speech - classification - mel-cepstrum
