• Journal of Korean Medical Ki-Gong Academy
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• v.23 no.1
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• pp.10-29
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• 2024

Objective : The purpose of this study is to determine whether An's breathing meditation qigong therapy (ABMQT) delivers bioenergy to the frontal lobe, prefrontal lobe, the olfactory tract in the mesolimbic pathway, olfactory bulb, CV22, CV21, olfactory area and vocal-related areas in Parkinson's disease (PD) patients to help improve olfactory disorders (anosmia) and vocal functions. Methods : The subjects of this study were 4 patients with idiopathic PD (3 males/1 female, 65.0±NA/68.7±10.2 years old). ABMQT was applied once a week, 120 minutes per session for 12 weeks in a non-invasive and noncontact manner, and the test before and after ABMQT application included olfactory impairment test the Korean version of Sniffin' stick test (KVSS), voice acoustic test, aerodynamic test, vocal handicap index (VHI-30), and auditory perception scale test tools. The results before and after the experiment were analyzed assuming a normal distribution, and a chi-square test was performed using a continuity correction, and the significance level was set to p<0.05. And the medical diagnosis and findings of the examiner (doctor in charge) before and after the experiment were described. Results : KVSS was significant as 0.2±0.5 and 9.0±0.0 before and after the experiment. There was no significant difference between the voice acoustic test FO and Jitter, the vocal aerodynamic test MPT, SP, AE, the vocal disorder index test, and the auditory perception test. However, the medical diagnosis findings of four study subjects showed that olfactory disorders, voice disorders, and laryngeal function were improved before and after the application of ABMQT. Conclusions : The breathing meditation qigong program showed significant effects on improving the olfactory disorders (anosmia) and speech function of each study subject. However, to produce meaningful results, it is thought that experiments involving a larger number of research participants are necessary, and additional blood and FMRI tests are conducted to verify metabolic activities and the olfactory neuron signal transmission system.

• Korean Journal of Head & Neck Oncology
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• v.33 no.2
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• pp.17-22
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• 2017

Background and Objectives: Voice change after thyroidectomy may develop without injury of recurrent laryngeal nerve. Psychogenic or emotional factors related to voice change after thyroidectomy has been rarely studied. In this study, we sought to analyze the impact of anxiety on early state of post-thyroidectomy voice change. Materials and Methods: We made a retrospective chart review of 36 patients who underwent thyroidectomy for papillary thyroid carcinoma and voice exam before surgery, 2 weeks after and 1 month after surgery. All patients included in the study answered a questionnaire for State-Trait Anxiety Inventory ; STAI-KYZ (form Korean YZ). Clinico-pathologic factors and parameters of voice analysis were reviewed to analyze correlation to the anxiety index. Results: No differences were identified between clinicopathologic factors and preoperative parameters of voice analysis between patients with higher and lower level of anxiety. Noise to harmonic ratio (NHR) was higher in those patients with higher level of anxiety, 2 weeks after surgery (p=0.043). However, none of the parameters showed any difference 1 month later. Conclusion: With limited number of patients and short period of follow up, significant impact of preoperative anxiety on postoperative voice change after thyroidectomy could not be identified in this preliminary study.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.57-66
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• 2021

This study focuses on the issue of automatic severity classification of dysarthric speakers based on speech intelligibility. Speech intelligibility is a complex measure that is affected by the features of multiple speech dimensions. However, most previous studies are restricted to using features from a single speech dimension. To effectively capture the characteristics of the speech disorder, we extracted features of multiple speech dimensions: voice quality, prosody, and pronunciation. Voice quality consists of jitter, shimmer, Harmonic to Noise Ratio (HNR), number of voice breaks, and degree of voice breaks. Prosody includes speech rate (total duration, speech duration, speaking rate, articulation rate), pitch (F0 mean/std/min/max/med/25quartile/75 quartile), and rhythm (%V, deltas, Varcos, rPVIs, nPVIs). Pronunciation contains Percentage of Correct Phonemes (Percentage of Correct Consonants/Vowels/Total phonemes) and degree of vowel distortion (Vowel Space Area, Formant Centralized Ratio, Vowel Articulatory Index, F2-Ratio). Experiments were conducted using various feature combinations. The experimental results indicate that using features from all three speech dimensions gives the best result, with a 80.15 F1-score, compared to using features from just one or two speech dimensions. The result implies voice quality, prosody, and pronunciation features should all be considered in automatic severity classification of dysarthria.

• Journal of Oriental Neuropsychiatry
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• v.24 no.3
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• pp.321-330
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• 2013

Voice Handicap Index and Voice-Related Quality of Life in Idiopathic Parkinson's Disease 10.7231/jon.2013.24.2.155, The Differences of Learning Characteristics in Sasang Constitution 10.7231/jon.2013.24.2.163, A Preliminary Comparison of the Efficacy of Auricular Acupuncture, Transdermal Nicotine Patch and Combination Therapy for Smoking Cessation 10.7231/jon.2013.24.2.179, The Effects of OnDam-tang-Kami-bang (ODK) in Antioxidant and Serotonin Metabolism Testing on P815 Cell 10.7231/jon.2013.24.2.189

• Journal of the Korean Society of Laryngology, Phoniatrics and Logopedics
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• v.19 no.2
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• pp.113-116
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• 2008

Baekgroud and Objectives: The study was purposed to evaluate the relationship between the voice change and the menstrual cycle by measuring the variation of subjective and objective parameters. Materials and Methods: Prospective study of 13 healthy women during 2 mentrual cycles. Their voices were recorded at follicular phase and then luteal phase of the menstrual cycle. We used both single vowel /a/ and sentences for evaluate acoustic parameters. Aerodynamic parameters were also evaluated. Voice handicap index (VHI), and the presence of premenstrual syndromes (PMS) were checked at each period. We used Wilcoxon's signed rank test to compare the parameters of two periods. Results: VHI were 5.1 at both periods (p=0.146) and 92.3% of women were diagnosable with PMS. There were no significant differences in acoustic parameters and aerodynamic parameters between the two periods. Conclusion: This study shows that not only the subjective but also the objective changes of the voice parameters did not exist during the menstrual cycle in women.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.133-138
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• 2014

This study attempted to investigate the validation of Phonation Threshold Power of Patients who have Functional voice disorder. 50 subjects participated in the study (32 subjects were patients who had functional voice disorders and 20 subjects were normal adults). The PAS (Phonatory aerodynamic system, model 6600, KAY electronics, Inc.) was used to measure the data and to do the analysis. Data from the Phonation Threshold Power was measured multiplying Phonation Threshold Pressure and Phonation Threshold Airflow. Phonation Threshold Pressure and Phonation Threshold Airflow were measured by the PAS protocol. Those were used because of the ease of phonation. The results of this study showed that the differences in Phonation Threshold Power between patients who had functional voice disorder and normal adults could become a significant index. Patients who had functional voice disorder showed more higher figures than normal adults. The results of study showed that Phonation threshold Power is more sensitive than Phonation Threshold Pressure and Phonation Threshold Airflow. The measured data also provided useful information for diagnosing patients with vocal fold.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Laryngology, Phoniatrics and Logopedics
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• v.21 no.1
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• pp.37-41
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• 2010

Background and Objectives : Transient minor voice changes after thyroidectomy are not infrequent complaints even in cases without any evidence of recurrent laryngeal nerve damage. However, clinical course, diagnosis and management of such voice changes are not fully understood. This study aimed to evaluate the clinical characteristics of minor voice changes after thyroidectomy. We also tried to assess the significance and feasibility of superior laryngeal nerve monitoring and to find out the optimal evaluation tools for such voice changes after thyroidectomy. Materials and Method : Nine adult patients who received total thyroidectomy without evidence of recurrent laryngeal nerve injury were enrolled for this prospective study. Voice evaluations were performed preoperatively and 3 months postoperatively ; acoustic analyses including voice range profile, aerodynamic study, stroboscopic evaluation and subjective voice assessment with questionnaires. The external branch of superior laryngeal nerve was monitored by nerve stimulator after ligation of superior thyroidal vessels. Results: Four of nine patients complained their voice change at 3 months after the surgery. Three of them reported complete recovery of their voice at 6 months after the surgery. Acoustic analysis revealed significant decrease in their phonatory range especially with high tone loss. Questionnaires related to singing was more sensitive than previously well-known "voice handicap index". Stimulation of the superior laryngeal nerve was feasible in most of the cases (94.4%), but it failed to show any correlation with minor voice changes after thyroidectomy. Conclusion : Minor voice changes were not rare events during the first 6 month after thyroidectomy. Decrease in phonatory range with high tone loss and therefore, discomfort in singing was the most common finding. Superior laryngeal monitoring was feasible but it was not a sensitive tool for the prediction of minor voice change after thyroidectomy.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.30 no.9C
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• pp.877-886
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• 2005

Various frame recovery algorithms have been suggested to overcome the communication quality degradation problem due to Internet-typical impairments on Voice over IP(VoIP) communications. In this paper, we propose a new receiver-based recovery method which is able to enhance recovered speech quality with almost free computational cost and without an additional increment of delay and bandwidth consumption. Most conventional recovery algorithms try to recover the lost or erroneous speech frames by reconstructing missing coefficients or speech signal during speech decoding process. Thus they eventually need to modify the decoder software. The proposed frame recovery algorithm tries to reconstruct the missing frame itself, and does not require the computational burden of modifying the decoder. In the proposed scheme, the Vector Quantization(VQ) codebook indices of the erased frame are directly estimated by referring the pre-computed VQ Codebook Index Interpolation Tables(VCIIT) using the VQ indices from the adjacent(previous and next) frames. We applied the proposed scheme to the ITU-T G.723.1 speech coder and found that it improved reconstructed speech quality and outperforms conventional G.723.1 loss recovery algorithm. Moreover, the suggested simple scheme can be easily applicable to practical VoIP systems because it requires a very small amount of additional computational cost and memory space.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Laryngology, Phoniatrics and Logopedics
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• v.26 no.1
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• pp.25-33
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• 2015

Background and Objectives:The objective of this study was to investigate the features of post-thyroidectomy subjective voice disorder by Voice Handicap Index (VHI) and Voice Symptom Scale (VOISS) through aerodynamic analysis and to investigate the appropriate voice therapy intervention. Materials and Methods:Twenty post-thyroidectomy patients who had no recurrent laryngeal nerve paralysis through laryngeal stroboscopy were enrolled for this study. Acoustic and aerodynamic evaluations were performed before operation, 2 weeks and 3 months after operation. Subjective voice evaluation was performed by VHI and VOISS. Aerodynamic evaluation was compared and analysed by maximum phonation time(MPT), phonation threshold pressure(PTP), mean air flow rate(MFR), etc. Subjective voice evaluation was surveyed through VHI and VOISS. To evaluate patients' symptoms related to functional voice disorder, scores on physical domain in VHI and VOISS were selected to be compared for each session. Results: The 10 out of 20 participants who complained of voice symptoms had no significant difference with pre-operation in acoustic evaluation, but all showed higher scores on 2 weeks and 3 months after operation compared to pre-operation, in VHI-physical domain and selected questionnaires in VOISS. They reduced MPT and increased PTP value simultaneously. Laryngeal massage and breathing training were simultaneously treated to them, 5 participants resulting in improvement in MPT and PTP compared to pre-treatment. Conclusion:Patients who complained voice change with no organic damage after thyroidectomy were all shown to have reduced MPT and increased PTP in some by aerodynamic evaluations. Reduced MPT may imply some problem in air flow beneath glottis. Increased PTP suggests much more effort in vocalization mechanism than pre-operation. Comparing aerodynamic evaluations in post-thyroidectomy may provide information on behavioral interventions. Additionally, study on laryngeal massage and breathing training simultaneously treated to patients with such voice disorder is needed to be conducted with larger number of participants.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartB
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• v.18B no.6
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• pp.389-396
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• 2011

There is getting worse to various liver diseases due to change in eating habits, stress, alcohol etc in modern society. Therefore, we proposed methodology to diagnose early for liver disease to study the influence on voice in liver diseases. To this end, we carried out experiment to apply parameter of voice analysis to collect each voice inpatients and patients by treatment of liver diseases patients. Particularly, we carried out experiment to apply element value of pronunciation and the third formant frequency bandwidths about velar sounds associated liver in oriental medicine, then to produce objective index resonance cavity and influence vocalization in liver diseases. In addition, we carried out to study about design of system to monitoring a liver function in u-Health environment based on result by experiment.