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Characterizing Neurological Disease from Voice Quality Biomechanical Analysis

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Abstract

The dramatic impact of neurological degenerative pathologies in life quality is a growing concern nowadays. Many techniques have been designed for the detection, diagnosis, and monitoring of the neurological disease. Most of them are too expensive or complex for being used by primary attention medical services. On the other hand, it is well known that many neurological diseases leave a signature in voice and speech. Through the present paper, a new method to trace some neurological diseases at the level of phonation will be shown. In this way, the detection and grading of the neurological disease could be based on a simple voice test. This methodology is benefiting from the advances achieved during the last years in detecting and grading organic pathologies in phonation. The paper hypothesizes that some of the underlying neurological mechanisms affecting phonation produce observable correlates in vocal fold biomechanics and that these correlates behave differentially in neurological diseases than in organic pathologies. A general description about the main hypotheses involved and their validation by acoustic voice analysis based on biomechanical correlates of the neurological disease is given. The validation is carried out on a balanced database of normal and organic dysphonic patients of both genders. Selected study cases will be presented to illustrate the possibilities offered by this methodology.

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Acknowledgments

This work has been funded by grants TEC2009-14123-C04-03 and TEC2012-38630-C04-04 from Plan Nacional de I + D + i, Ministry of Science and Technology, Spain.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Grupo de Informática Aplicada al Tratamiento de Señal e Imagen, Facultad de Informática, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Campus de Montegancedo, s/n, 28660, Madrid, Spain

    Pedro Gómez-Vilda, Victoria Rodellar-Biarge, Víctor Nieto-Lluis, Cristina Muñoz-Mulas, Luis Miguel Mazaira-Fernández, Rafael Martínez-Olalla & Agustín Álvarez-Marquina

  2. Ear, Neck and Throat (ENT) and Neurology Services, Hospital del Henares, Avda. Marie Curie s/n, 28822 Coslada, Madrid, Spain

    Carlos Ramírez-Calvo & Mario Fernández-Fernández

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  1. Pedro Gómez-Vilda
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  2. Victoria Rodellar-Biarge
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  3. Víctor Nieto-Lluis
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Correspondence to Pedro Gómez-Vilda.

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Gómez-Vilda, P., Rodellar-Biarge, V., Nieto-Lluis, V. et al. Characterizing Neurological Disease from Voice Quality Biomechanical Analysis. Cogn Comput 5, 399–425 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12559-013-9207-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12559-013-9207-2

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