Tape-recorded voices of 30 patients were acoustically analysed: 10 had glottic Tla carcinoma, 10 unilateral vocal fold polyp and 10 unilateral recurrent laryngeal nerve paralysis. The carcinoma cases were treated with laser surgery with/without radiotherapy, the polyp cases with endolaryngeal microsurgery and the paralysis cases with intrafold silicone injection. The acoustic analysis was conducted before and after the treatment for each patient. Three acoustic parameters, viz. pitch perturbation quotient (PPQ), amplitude perturbation quotient (APQ) and normalized noise energy (NNE), were employed. The results were as follows: (1) PPQ and APQ were greater in paralysis cases than in carcinoma and polyp cases; (2) none of the parameters was useful in differentiating the three disease groups investigated; (3) all three parameters proved to be useful in monitoring the effects of treatments; (4) all three parameters were positively correlated to the grade of hoarseness, rough and breathy quality of hoarseness, mean airflow rate and regularity of vocal fold vibration viewed under stroboscopy; (5) PPQ, APQ and NNE were positively related to each other.

No abstract

An adaptive comb filtering method, which was initially investigated by Frazier et al.[5J for the enhancement of degraded speech due to additive noise, is applied for estimating vocal noise generated at the glottis due to pathological changes of the vocal folds. In applying the method, special emphasis is placed on the accurate determination of pitch period durations. The amount of estimated vocal noise is quantified by a novel acoustic measure, normalized noise energy(NNE).Experiments with vowel samples spoken by 64 normal control subjects and 50 patients with glottic cancer have shown that the NNE is useful for the distinction between normal and pathological voice status.

We have developed an integrated voice analyzer (IVA) using DSP (TMS32010) to achieve high-speed acoustic analyses of a sustained vowel. A personal computer connected to the IVA is employed as the man-machine interface as well as to display and save various analysis results. The IVA has many functions, such as detecting vocal noise by an adaptive comb filter, measuring period and amplitude perturbation quotients, calculating DFT spectra and LPC coefficients, etc. The results are stored into a disk file to do statistical analysis or to perform further analyses. This system provides an interactive acoustic analysis method for quantitative evaluations of the pathological voice arising in various voice research and clinical areas. We describe an application of the IVA for the clinical screening system for pathological voices, where hoarseness grade (HG) of a voice can be obtained from five sustained phonations. [Work supported by a Japanese Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research.]

A 60-year-old man visited our hospital with complaints of micturition pain and interruption of urinary stream. X-ray examinations were performed, showing no bladder and urethral stone. However, KUB revealed bilateral multiple renal stones. Excretory urography showed a horseshoe kidney and a concentration of the contrast medium in the ectatic tubules at the pyramidal apices. Calculi were also located in these ectatic tubules. Thus, we considered that this was a very rare case of medullary sponge disease associated with horseshoe kidney. So far there has been no case report of medullary sponge disease with horseshoe kidney in our country.