Objective assessment of pathological voice quality using multi-layer perceptrons

A method of accurately measuring relative vocal fold quality in cancer of larynx patients is presented. The aim of this work is to enable speech and language therapists (SALTS) to provide an objective assessment during clinical evaluation. Earlier work has shown that Multi-layer Perceptrons (MLP) are able to assist in the decision making process to distinguish normal and abnormal voice quality. More recently, a method of separating the distribution of the fundamental frequency and its harmonics (FHN) from the spectral envelope has been proposed. This paper shows that FHN spectra provide superior classification results compared with earlier work.