A Comparative Study of Vowels Produced by Normal Subjects and Patients with Malignant Vocal Folds by Correlation Coefficient and Difference Sum of Narrow-band Spectra

악성종양환자와 정상인이 발성한 모음의 좁은대역 스펙트럼값의 상관계수와 절대차이합 비교

The objective of this study was to examine two new parameters by which we could screen people with malignant vocal folds. The new parameters were the difference sums and Pearson correlation coefficients between adjacent pairs of intensity level matrices of narrow-band spectra. Audio files from the Korean Disordered Speech Database were analyzed by Praat, a speech analysis software, to obtain matrices of 400 intensity levels at 16 time points of each sustained vowel spectra. We limited our study to 12 normal subjects and 20 patients with malignant vocal folds who recorded at least three Korean vowels at a sound-proofed booth in Busan National University Hospital. Results indicated that the average coefficients of the abnormal subjects were much lower than those of the normal subjects while the average difference sums of the patients were much higher than those of the normal ones. Also, we found that the degree of the malignancy of the vocal folds was related to the coefficients and sums. However, some subjects at the initial stages of cancerous vocal folds yielded almost comparable coefficients and difference sums to those of the normal speakers. Further studies on larger databases will be desirable to set certain criteria or threshold levels for screening people with vocal fold diseases.