• Journal of the Korean Society of Laryngology, Phoniatrics and Logopedics
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.110-116
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• 2003

Background and Objectives : Laryngeal cancer discrimination using voice signals is a non-invasive method that can carry out the examination rapidly and simply without giving discomfort to the patients. n appropriate analysis parameters and classifiers are developed, this method can be used effectively in various applications including telemedicine. This study examines voice analysis parameters used for laryngeal disease discrimination to help discriminate laryngeal diseases by voice signal analysis. The study also estimates the laryngeal cancer discrimination activity of the Gaussian mixture model (GMM) classifier based on the statistical modelling of voice analysis parameters. Materials and Methods : The Multi-dimensional voice program (MDVP) parameters, which have been widely used for the analysis of laryngeal cancer voice, sometimes fail to analyze the voice of a laryngeal cancer patient whose cycle is seriously damaged. Accordingly, it is necessary to develop a new method that enables an analysis of high reliability for the voice signals that cannot be analyzed by the MDVP. To conduct the experiments of laryngeal cancer discrimination, the authors used three types of voices collected at the Department of Otorhinorlaryngology, Pusan National University Hospital. 50 normal males voice data, 50 voices of males with benign laryngeal diseases and 105 voices of males laryngeal cancer. In addition, the experiment also included 11 voices data of males with laryngeal cancer that cannot be analyzed by the MDVP, Only monosyllabic vowel /a/ was used as voice data. Since there were only 11 voices of laryngeal cancer patients that cannot be analyzed by the MDVP, those voices were used only for discrimination. This study examined the linear predictive cepstral coefficients (LPCC) and the met-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC) that are the two major cepstrum analysis methods in the area of acoustic recognition. Results : The results showed that this met frequency scaling process was effective in acoustic recognition but not useful for laryngeal cancer discrimination. Accordingly, the linear frequency cepstral coefficients (LFCC) that excluded the met frequency scaling from the MFCC was introduced. The LFCC showed more excellent discrimination activity rather than the MFCC in predictability of laryngeal cancer. Conclusion : In conclusion, the parameters applied in this study could discriminate accurately even the terminal laryngeal cancer whose periodicity is disturbed. Also it is thought that future studies on various classification algorithms and parameters representing pathophysiology of vocal cords will make it possible to discriminate benign laryngeal diseases as well, in addition to laryngeal cancer.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartA
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• v.13A no.5 s.102
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• pp.465-472
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• 2006

Recently, many suggestions have been made in image segmentation methods for extracting human organs or disease affected area from huge amounts of medical image datasets. However, images from some areas, such as brain, which have multiple structures with ambiruous structural borders, have limitations in their structural segmentation. To address this problem, clustering technique which classifies voxels into finite number of clusters is often employed. This, however, has its drawback, the influence from noise, which is caused from voxel by voxel operations. Therefore, applying image enhancing method to minimize the influence from noise and to make clearer image borders would allow more robust structural segmentation. This research proposes an efficient structural segmentation method by filtering based clustering to extract detail structures such as white matter, gray matter and cerebrospinal fluid from brain MR. First, coherence enhancing diffusion filtering is adopted to make clearer borders between structures and to reduce the noises in them. To the enhanced images from this process, fuzzy c-means clustering method was applied, conducting structural segmentation by assigning corresponding cluster index to the structure containing each voxel. The suggested structural segmentation method, in comparison with existing ones with clustering using Gaussian or general anisotropic diffusion filtering, showed enhanced accuracy which was determined by how much it agreed with the manual segmentation results. Moreover, by suggesting fine segmentation method on the border area with reproducible results and minimized manual task, it provides efficient diagnostic support for morphological abnormalities in brain.