Aim: The research described is intended to give a description of articulation dynamics as a correlate of the kinematic behavior of the jaw-tongue biomechanical system, encoded as a probability distribution of an absolute joint velocity. This distribution may be used in detecting and grading speech from patients affected by neurodegenerative illnesses, as Parkinson Disease. Hypothesis: The work hypothesis is that the probability density function of the absolute joint velocity includes information on the stability of phonation when applied to sustained vowels, as well as on fluency if applied to connected speech. Methods: A dataset of sustained vowels recorded from Parkinson Disease patients is contrasted with similar recordings from normative subjects. The probability distribution of the absolute kinematic velocity of the jaw-tongue system is extracted from each utterance. A Random Least Squares Feed-Forward Network (RLSFN) has been used as a binary classifier working on the pathological and normative datasets in a leave-one-out strategy. Monte Carlo simulations have been conducted to estimate the influence of the stochastic nature of the classifier. Two datasets for each gender were tested (males and females) including 26 normative and 53 pathological subjects in the male set, and 25 normative and 38 pathological in the female set. Results: Male and female data subsets were tested in single runs, yielding equal error rates under 0.6% (Accuracy over 99.4%). Due to the stochastic nature of each experiment, Monte Carlo runs were conducted to test the reliability of the methodology. The average detection results after 200 Montecarlo runs of a 200 hyperplane hidden layer RLSFN are given in terms of Sensitivity (males: 0.9946, females: 0.9942), Specificity (males: 0.9944, females: 0.9941) and Accuracy (males: 0.9945, females: 0.9942). The area under the ROC curve is 0.9947 (males) and 0.9945 (females). The equal error rate is 0.0054 (males) and 0.0057 (females). Conclusions: The proposed methodology avails that the use of highly normalized descriptors as the probability distribution of kinematic variables of vowel articulation stability, which has some interesting properties in terms of information theory, boosts the potential of simple yet powerful classifiers in producing quite acceptable detection results in Parkinson Disease.
Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a degenerative neuromuscular disease, one of its early symptoms being a progressive difficulty to speak (ALS dysarthria). To improve its diagnosis and monitoring, a new method based on articulatory movement estimation has been developed. As a result, two articulatory movement parameters are presented as well as their relationship with the illness grade.
Through this paper, the combination of linear andnon-linear techniques for noise filtering is proposed.A first linear processing stage in the time domain (anadaptive lattice ladder filter)[2],[5] is followed by anon-linear processing block in the frequency domain.The association of both procedures provides a muchhigher level of cancellation than their individualapplication. An added result is that the application ofthe frequency domain non-linear processing makes itpossible to use very short adaptive filters, with theresulting savings in computational powerrequirements.
El circuito que a continuacion se presenta implementa una seccion del modelo de la coclea humana. En su conjunto, el modelo tratado divide a la coclea en seis secciones identicas. En cada una de estas secciones se estudia el tratamiento de la onda sonora, obteniendose el comportamiento de la coclea. De dicho estudio se obtienen las ecuaciones del modelo. La finalidad del chip es implementar estas ecuaciones. Para realizar todas las operaciones necesarias, la unidad de calculo del chip tiene la posibilidad de realizar multiplicaciones y sumas, asi como transferencias ente registros y memoria.
Hypokinetic dysarthria (HD), frequently diagnosed in Parkinson's Disease (PD), and presbyphonia share common manifestations which may hamper pathology detection and monitoring based on acoustic analysis. The present work seeks to differentiate phonation feature sets specific of presbyphonic voice from those specific of HD.