Adjunctive Use of Perturbation Analysis for Objective Assessment of Laryngeal Surgery.
Wesley E. McDonald, Barbara Jean Zyski, Michael E. Johns, Glen L. Bull · PubMed Central · 1981
The vibratory pattern of a the voice of a patient with a laryngeal disorder may provide information related to phonatory function. The fundamental period of the acoustic signal is increasingly aperiodic as the severity of laryngeal impairment increases, and therefore provides one means of assessing the efficacy of laryngeal surgery. A system which integrates the process of data collection and analysis was developed for direct assessment of voice disorders in a laryngology clinic. The signal is sampled at a 100 kiloHertz rate as the patient phonates. A computer-assisted analysis routine is then used to extract periodicity information. This information and the patient's history are added to a data base of all patients stored on disk. The information compiled in this manner can be used to assess the status of a patient across successive visits, and to compare a patient with a given laryngeal disorder with results obtained for patients with similar disorders.