Comparator Loss: An Ordinal Contrastive Loss to Derive a Severity Score for Speech-based Health Monitoring

Monitoring the progression of neurodegenerative disease (NDD) has important applications in planning treatment and evaluating new medications. Whereas much work has focused on discriminating patients from healthy controls, or predicting real-world health metrics, we propose a novel measure of disease progression: the severity score, derived from a model trained to minimize what we call the comparator loss. This loss ensures scores obey an ordering relation, based on diagnosis, clinical scores, or simply chronological order of recordings. The proposed comparator loss-based system has the potential to incorporate information from disparate health metrics, critical for making full use of small health-related datasets. We show that a model trained on lightly annotated data is capable of distinguishing between subjects with NDDs and healthy controls. Our score also correlates with annotations not observed in training, such as ALSFRS-R and those of speech and language therapists.