The classification study with the use of machine learning concepts has been applied for years, and one of the aspects in which this can be applied is for the analysis of speech acoustics applied to the analysis of pathologies. Among the pathologies present, one of them is chronic laryngitis. Thus, this article aims to present the results for a classification of chronic laryngitis with the use of Long Short Term Memory as a classifier. The parameters of relative jitter, relative shimmer and autocorrelation was used as input of the LSTM. A dataset of about 1500 instances were used to train, validate and test along 4 experiments with LSTM and one feedforward Artificial Neural Network (ANN). The results of the LSTM overcome the ones of the feedforward ANN, and was about 100% accuracy, sensitivity and specificity in test set, denoting a promising future for this classification tool in the voice pathologies diagnose.
The harmonic parameters Autocorrelation, Harmonic to Noise Ratio (HNR), and Noise to Harmonic Ratio are related to vocal quality, providing alternative measures of the harmonic energy of a speech signal. They will be used as input resources for an intelligent medical decision support system for the diagnosis of speech pathology. An efficient algorithm is important when implementing it on low-power devices. This article presents an algorithm that determines these parameters by optimizing the window type and length. The method used comparatively analyzes the values of the algorithm, with different combinations of window and size and a reference value. Hamming, Hanning, and Blackman windows with lengths of 3, 6, 12, and 24 glottal cycles and various sampling frequencies were investigated. As a result, we present an efficient algorithm that determines the parameters using the Hanning window with a length of six glottal cycles. The mean difference of Autocorrelation is less than 0.004, and that of HNR is less than 0.42 dB. In conclusion, this algorithm allows extraction of the parameters close to the reference values. In Autocorrelation, there are no significant effects of sampling frequency. However, it should be used cautiously for HNR with lower sampling rates.