Voice pathology detection by vocal cord biomechanical parameter estimation

Voice pathologies have become a social concern, as voice and speech play an important role in certain professions, and in the general population quality of life. In these last years emphasis has been placed in early pathology detection, for which classical perturbation measurements (jitter, shimmer, HNR, etc.) have been used. Going one step ahead the present work is aimed to estimate the values of the biomechanical parameters of the vocal fold system, as mass, stiffness and losses by the inversion of the vocal fold structure, which could help non only in pathology detection, but in classifying the specific patient's pathology as well. The model structure of the vocal cord will be presented, and a method to estimate the biomechanical parameters of the cord body structure will be described. From these, deviations from normophonic cases, and unbalance between cords may be extracted to serve as pathology correlates. The relevance of deviations and unbalance in Pathology Detection is shown through Principal Component Analysis. Results for normal and pathological cases will be presented and discussed.