EUROSPEECH 2003 - INTERSPEECH 2003 8th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology Geneva, Switzerland September 1-4, 2003

Robust Techniques for Pre- and Post-Surgical Voice Analysis

Claudia Manfredi (1), Giorgio Peretti (2)

(1) University of Florence, Italy
(2) Civil Brescia Hospital, Italy

Objective measure and tracking of the most relevant voice parameters is obtained for voice signals coming from patients that underwent thyroplasty implant. Due to the strong noise component and high non-stationarity of the pre-surgical signal, robust methods are proposed, capable to recover the fundamental frequency, tracking formants, and quantify the degree of hoarseness as well as the patient's functional recovery in an objective way. Thanks to its high-resolution properties, autoregressive parametric modelling is considered, with modifications required for the present application. The method is applied to sustained /a/ vowels, recorded from patients suffering from unilateral vocal cord paralysis. Pre- and post-surgical parameters are evaluated, that allow the physician quantifying the effectiveness of the Montgomery thyroplasty implant.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Manfredi, Claudia / Peretti, Giorgio (2003): "Robust techniques for pre- and post-surgical voice analysis", In EUROSPEECH-2003, 2365-2368.