The Use of Arabic Vowels to Model the Pathological Effect of Influenza Disease by Wavelets.

Speech parameters may include perturbation measurements, spectral and cepstral modeling, and pathological effects of some diseases, like influenza, that affect the vocal tract. The verification task is a very good process to discriminate between different types of voice disorder. This study investigated the modeling of influenza's pathological effects on the speech signals of the Arabic vowels "A" and "O." For feature extraction, linear prediction coding (LPC) of discrete wavelet transform (DWT) subsignals denoted by LPCW was used. k-Nearest neighbor (KNN) and support vector machine (SVM) classifiers were used for classification. To study the pathological effects of influenza on the vowel "A" and vowel "O," power spectral density (PSD) and spectrogram were illustrated, where the PSD of "A" and "O" was repressed as a result of the pathological effects. The obtained results showed that the verification parameters achieved for the vowel "A" were better than those for vowel "O" for both KNN and SVM for an average. The receiver operating characteristic curve was used for interpretation. The modeling by the speech utterances as words was also investigated. We can claim that the speech utterances as words could model the influenza disease with a good quality of the verification parameters with slightly less performance than the vowels "A" as speech utterances. A comparison with state-of-the-art method was made. The best results were achieved by the LPCW method.

The Use of LPC and Wavelet Transform for Influenza Disease Modeling.

In this paper, we investigated the modeling of the pathological features of the influenza disease on the human speech. The presented work is novel research based on a real database and a new combination of previously used methods, discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and linear prediction coding (LPC). Three verification system experiments, Normal/Influenza, Smokers/Influenza, and Normal/Smokers, were studied. For testing the proposed pathological system, several classification scores were calculated for the recorded database, from which we can see that the proposed method achieved very high scores, particularly for the Normal with Influenza verification system. The performance of the proposed system was also compared with other published recognition systems. The experiments of these schemes show that the proposed method is superior.

Characterization Methods for the Detection of Multiple Voice Disorders: Neurological, Functional, and Laryngeal Diseases.

This paper evaluates the accuracy of different characterization methods for the automatic detection of multiple speech disorders. The speech impairments considered include dysphonia in people with Parkinson's disease (PD), dysphonia diagnosed in patients with different laryngeal pathologies (LP), and hypernasality in children with cleft lip and palate (CLP). Four different methods are applied to analyze the voice signals including noise content measures, spectral-cepstral modeling, nonlinear features, and measurements to quantify the stability of the fundamental frequency. These measures are tested in six databases: three with recordings of PD patients, two with patients with LP, and one with children with CLP. The abnormal vibration of the vocal folds observed in PD patients and in people with LP is modeled using the stability measures with accuracies ranging from 81% to 99% depending on the pathology. The spectral-cepstral features are used in this paper to model the voice spectrum with special emphasis around the first two formants. These measures exhibit accuracies ranging from 95% to 99% in the automatic detection of hypernasal voices, which confirms the presence of changes in the speech spectrum due to hypernasality. Noise measures suitably discriminate between dysphonic and healthy voices in both databases with speakers suffering from LP. The results obtained in this study suggest that it is not suitable to use every kind of features to model all of the voice pathologies; conversely, it is necessary to study the physiology of each impairment to choose the most appropriate set of features.

Application of wavelet transform for PDZ domain classification.

PDZ domains have been identified as part of an array of signaling proteins that are often unrelated, except for the well-conserved structural PDZ domain they contain. These domains have been linked to many disease processes including common Avian influenza, as well as very rare conditions such as Fraser and Usher syndromes. Historically, based on the interactions and the nature of bonds they form, PDZ domains have most often been classified into one of three classes (class I, class II and others - class III), that is directly dependent on their binding partner. In this study, we report on three unique feature extraction approaches based on the bigram and trigram occurrence and existence rearrangements within the domain's primary amino acid sequences in assisting PDZ domain classification. Wavelet packet transform (WPT) and Shannon entropy denoted by wavelet entropy (WE) feature extraction methods were proposed. Using 115 unique human and mouse PDZ domains, the existence rearrangement approach yielded a high recognition rate (78.34%), which outperformed our occurrence rearrangements based method. The recognition rate was (81.41%) with validation technique. The method reported for PDZ domain classification from primary sequences proved to be an encouraging approach for obtaining consistent classification results. We anticipate that by increasing the database size, we can further improve feature extraction and correct classification.