Separating Voice from Age in COPD Screening
Voice has been proposed as a low-cost screening signal for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). COPD is strongly age-associated and voice changes with age, thus such results admit a trivial alternative explanation. We re-evaluate a public sustained-phonation corpus ($1246$ recordings, $68$ participants) under a strictly participant-level protocol. We therefore evaluate on repeatedly drawn age-matched cohorts and report the discrimination achieved by the confounders themselves on those same cohorts. Where raw (unmodelled) age ($0.510$ $[0.469, 0.551]$) and raw gender ($0.479$) are both measured at chance, acoustic models excluding age retain ROC-AUC $0.717$ $[0.552, 0.859]$ and av...
| Authors | George P. Kafentzis, Nikoletta Arvaniti |
|---|---|
| Primary category | eess.AS |
| Published | 21 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 21 August 2026 |
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