title: Pathological likelihood index as a measurement of the degree of voice normality and perceived hoarseness.
abstract: A new index is introduced in this article to measure the degree of normality in the speech. The proposed parameter has demonstrated to be correlated with the perceived hoarseness, giving an indication of the degree of normality. The calculation of such a parameter is based on a statistical model developed to represent normal and pathological voices. The modeling is built around Gaussian mixture models and Mel frequency cepstral coefficients. The proposed index has been named pathological likelihood index (PLI). PLI is compared with other aperiodicity features (such as jitter and shimmer), and measurements sensitive to additive noise (such as harmonics-to-noise ratio (HNR), cepstrum-based HNR, normalized noise energy, and glottal-to-noise excitation ratio). The proposed parameter is revealed to be a good estimator of the presence of pathology, showing lower correlation with noise, frequency, and amplitude perturbation parameters than these classical features among them.
authors.affiliation: Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Circuits & Systems Engineering Department, Ctra. de Valencia, Madrid, Spain. igodino@ics.upm.es
authors.forename: Juan Ignacio
authors.initials: JI
authors.lastname: Godino-Llorente
authors.forename: Pedro
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Gómez-Vilda
authors.forename: Fernando
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Cruz-Roldán
authors.forename: Manuel
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Blanco-Velasco
authors.forename: Rubén
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Fraile
mesh_terms: D005583:Fourier Analysis; D006685:Hoarseness / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000503:physiopathology / Q000523:psychology; D006801:Humans; D016013:Likelihood Functions; D010699:Phonation; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012720:Severity of Illness Index; D012815:Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted; D013018:Sound Spectrography; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013067:Speech Perception; D013068:Speech Production Measurement; D013997:Time Factors; D014833:Voice Quality