The speech signal contains a vast spectrum of information about the speaker such as speakers’ gender, age, accent, or health state. In this paper, we explored different approaches to automatic speaker’s gender classification and age estimation system using speech signals. We applied various Deep Neural Network-based embedder architectures such as x-vector and d-vector to age estimation and gender classification tasks. Furthermore, we have applied a transfer learning-based training scheme with pre-training the embedder network for a speaker recognition task using the Vox-Celeb1 dataset and then fine-tuning it for the joint age estimation and gender classification task. The best performing system achieves new state-of-the-art results on the age estimation task using popular TIMIT dataset with a mean absolute error (MAE) of 5.12 years for male and 5.29 years for female speakers and a root-mean square error (RMSE) of 7.24 and 8.12 years for male and female speakers, respectively, and an overall gender recognition accuracy of 99.60%.

This study explores an innovative approach to early Parkinson’s disease (PD) detection by analyzing speech data collected using a mixed reality (MR) system. A total of 57 Polish participants, including PD patients and healthy controls, performed five speech tasks while using an MR head-mounted display (HMD). Speech data were recorded and analyzed to extract acoustic and linguistic features, which were then evaluated using machine learning models, including logistic regression, support vector machines (SVMs), random forests, AdaBoost, and XGBoost. The XGBoost model achieved the best performance, with an F1-score of 0.90 ± 0.05 in the story-retelling task. Key features such as MFCCs (mel-frequency cepstral coefficients), spectral characteristics, RASTA-filtered auditory spectrum, and local shimmer were identified as significant in detecting PD-related speech alterations. Additionally, state-of-the-art deep learning models (wav2vec2, HuBERT, and WavLM) were fine-tuned for PD detection. HuBERT achieved the highest performance, with an F1-score of 0.94 ± 0.04 in the diadochokinetic task, demonstrating the potential of deep learning to capture complex speech patterns linked to neurodegenerative diseases. This study highlights the effectiveness of combining MR technology for speech data collection with advanced machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) techniques, offering a non-invasive and high-precision approach to PD diagnosis. The findings hold promise for broader clinical applications, advancing the diagnostic landscape for neurodegenerative disorders.

Modeling and manufacturing of personalized cranial implants are important research areas that may decrease the waiting time for patients suffering from cranial damage. The modeling of personalized implants may be partially automated by the use of deep learning-based methods. However, this task suffers from difficulties with generalizability into data from previously unseen distributions that make it difficult to use the research outcomes in real clinical settings. Due to difficulties with acquiring ground-truth annotations, different techniques to improve the heterogeneity of datasets used for training the deep networks have to be considered and introduced. In this work, we present a large-scale study of several augmentation techniques, varying from classical geometric transformations, image registration, variational autoencoders, and generative adversarial networks, to the most recent advances in latent diffusion models. We show that the use of heavy data augmentation significantly increases both the quantitative and qualitative outcomes, resulting in an average Dice Score above 0.94 for the SkullBreak and above 0.96 for the SkullFix datasets. The results show that latent diffusion models combined with vector quantized variational autoencoder outperform other generative augmentation strategies. Moreover, we show that the synthetically augmented network successfully reconstructs real clinical defects, without the need to acquire costly and time-consuming annotations. The findings of the work will lead to easier, faster, and less expensive modeling of personalized cranial implants. This is beneficial to numerous people suffering from cranial injuries. The work constitutes a considerable contribution to the field of artificial intelligence in the automatic modeling of personalized cranial implants.