HSE Scientists Develop Application for Diagnosing Aphasia
Specialists at the HSE Centre for Language and Brain have developed an application for diagnosing language disorders (aphasia), which can result from head injuries, strokes, or other neurological conditions. AutoRAT is the first standardised digital tool in Russia for assessing the presence and severity of language disorders. The application is available on RuStore and can be used on mobile and tablet devices running the Android operating system.
Approximately 450,000 stroke cases are reported annually in Russia, with about one-third of patients developing aphasia. Aphasia is an acquired language disorder. A person with aphasia may struggle to understand others, speak, read, or write. Aphasia can result from brain damage caused by stroke, head injury, or tumour removal. Physicians diagnose aphasia based on clinical symptoms and neuropsychological assessment data. Timely diagnosis of aphasia is crucial, as working with a speech therapist and neuropsychologist can significantly accelerate language recovery and improve quality of life.
Researchers at the HSE Centre for Language and Brain have developed a standardised digital tool called AutoRAT (from the Russian Aphasia Test), enabling the detection of aphasia and the assessment of its severity. When creating materials for the application, the developers considered not only the linguistic characteristics of the words, sentences, and texts included in the stimulus set but also psycholinguistic factors. These factors included, for example, the age at which the words were learned, their frequency of use, how easily a person can visualise an object associated with the word, and the complexity of images related to specific stimuli. The AutoRAT application allows diagnostics to be completed in just 60 minutes, providing accurate data for the development of a rehabilitation programme.
The battery of language tests includes 13 different tasks that assess the preservation of all key linguistic levels: phonological, lexico-semantic, syntactic, and discourse. These tasks help identify deficits in comprehension, production, and repetition of speech, provide information about the overall severity of language disorders, and allow comparison of results with age-based norms.
Language comprehension tasks, such as distinguishing sounds and understanding words, sentences, and texts, are automatically processed within the app. To obtain results for tasks involving speech production and repetition—such as naming objects and actions, constructing sentences and stories from drawings, and repeating words and sentences—a detailed manual evaluation system was developed for the user. This allows for the identification of all aspects of language disorders in each participant.
Individual participant profiles are saved in the application for further analysis of the results. AutoRAT enables tracking of the dynamics of language recovery, allowing for the assessment of treatment effectiveness, which is crucial for future prognosis and selecting an appropriate rehabilitation programme. All results are available for download in table format, making them convenient for research purposes.
AutoRAT will be a valuable tool for speech therapists, neuropsychologists, researchers, and clinical specialists. Additionally, it will be useful for healthcare institutions, students, and teachers in medical and linguistic fields, developers of rehabilitation programmes, and research centres focused on cognitive and linguistic processes.
'We aimed to create a tool that would not only help specialists diagnose aphasia but also provide a comprehensive picture of language disorders. AutoRAT is a step toward more precise and personalised patient rehabilitation. This tool combines a strong theoretical linguistic foundation with practical advancements in the field of speech therapy. Our tool enables a detailed description of the core language deficit, making the diagnosis of aphasia even more accurate,' comments Olga Buivolova, one of the project participants and Research Fellow at the HSE Centre for Language and Brain. 'It sets new standards by integrating advanced scientific approaches with practical effectiveness. AutoRAT transforms the aphasia assessment process, making it more convenient, accurate, and highly efficient.'
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