Predicting Parkinson's Disease Progression Using Statistical and Neural Mixed Effects Models: A Comparative Study on Longitudinal Biomarkers

Predicting Parkinson's Disease (PD) progression is crucial, and voice biomarkers offer a non-invasive method for tracking symptom severity (UPDRS scores) through telemonitoring. Analyzing this longitudinal data is challenging due to within-subject correlations and complex, nonlinear patient-specific progression patterns. This study benchmarks LMMs against two advanced hybrid approaches: the Generalized Neural Network Mixed Model (GNMM) (Mandel 2021), which embeds a neural network within a GLMM structure, and the Neural Mixed Effects (NME) model (Wortwein 2023), allowing nonlinear subject-specific parameters throughout the network. Using the Oxford Parkinson's telemonitoring voice dataset, we evaluate these models' performance in predicting Total UPDRS to offer practical guidance for PD research and clinical applications.

MemeBLIP2: A novel lightweight multimodal system to detect harmful memes

Memes often merge visuals with brief text to share humor or opinions, yet some memes contain harmful messages such as hate speech. In this paper, we introduces MemeBLIP2, a light weight multimodal system that detects harmful memes by combining image and text features effectively. We build on previous studies by adding modules that align image and text representations into a shared space and fuse them for better classification. Using BLIP-2 as the core vision-language model, our system is evaluated on the PrideMM datasets. The results show that MemeBLIP2 can capture subtle cues in both modalities, even in cases with ironic or culturally specific content, thereby improving the detection of harmful material.