Background and objectives: Patients suffering from neurological diseases may develop dysarthria, a motor speech disorder affecting the execution of speech. Close and quantitative monitoring of dysarthria evolution is crucial for enabling clinicians to promptly implement patient management strategies and maximizing effectiveness and efficiency of communication functions in term of restoring, compensating or adjusting. In the clinical assessment of orofacial structures and functions, at rest condition or during speech and non-speech movements, a qualitative evaluation is usually performed, throughout visual observation. Methods: To overcome limitations posed by qualitative assessments, this work presents a store-and-forward self-service telemonitoring system that integrates, within its cloud architecture, a convolutional neural network (CNN) for analyzing video recordings acquired by individuals with dysarthria. This architecture, called facial landmark Mask RCNN, aims at locating facial landmarks as a prior for assessing the orofacial functions related to speech and examining dysarthria evolution in neurological diseases. Results: When tested on the Toronto NeuroFace dataset, a publicly available annotated dataset of video recordings from patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and stroke, the proposed CNN achieved a normalized mean error equal to 1.79 on localizing the facial landmarks. We also tested our system in a real-life scenario on 11 bulbar-onset ALS subjects, obtaining promising outcomes in terms of facial landmark position estimation. Discussion and conclusions: This preliminary study represents a relevant step towards the use of remote tools to support clinicians in monitoring the evolution of dysarthria.

针对神经系统疾病患者可能发展为言语运动障碍疾病，本研究提出了一种存储和转发的自助式远程监测系统，该系统集成了卷积神经网络（CNN），通过分析患有言语运动障碍疾病者的视频录像实现面部特征的定位，并能监测疾病的进展，为临床医生提供支持和帮助。

A store-and-forward cloud-based telemonitoring system for automatic
  assessing dysarthria evolution in neurological diseases from video-recording
  analysis

一种基于存储转发的云计算远程监测系统，用于自动评估神经病变中失语症演变的视频记录分析