Screening voice disorders with the glottal to noise excitation ratio

Abstract

This work evaluates the capabilities of the Glottal to Noise Excitation Ratio for the screening of voice disorders. A lot of effort has been made using this parameter to evaluate voice quality, but there do not exist studies that evaluate the discrimination capabilities of this acoustic parameter to classify between normal and pathological voices. A set of 226 speakers (53 normal and 173 pathological) taken from a voice disorders database were used to evaluate the usefulness of this parameter for discriminating normal and pathological voices. In order to evaluate this parameter, the effect of the bandwidth of the Hilbert envelopes and the frequency shift have been analyzed, concluding that a good discrimination is obtained with a bandwidth of 1000 Hz and a frequency shift of 300 Hz. The results confirm that the Glottal to Noise Excitation Ratio provides reliable measurements in terms of discrimination among normal and pathological voices, comparable to other classical long-term noise measurements found in the literature, such as Normalized Noise Energy or Harmonics to Noise Ratio, so this parameter is a good candidate to be used for screening purposes