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Towards robust voice pathology detection

Investigation of supervised deep learning, gradient boosting, and anomaly detection approaches across four databases

  • S.I.: Advances in Bio-Inspired Intelligent Systems
  • Published:
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A Correction to this article was published on 14 September 2019

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Abstract

Automatic objective non-invasive detection of pathological voice based on computerized analysis of acoustic signals can play an important role in early diagnosis, progression tracking, and even effective treatment of pathological voices. In search towards such a robust voice pathology detection system, we investigated three distinct classifiers within supervised learning and anomaly detection paradigms. We conducted a set of experiments using a variety of input data such as raw waveforms, spectrograms, mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC), and conventional acoustic (dysphonic) features (AF). In comparison with previously published works, this article is the first to utilize combination of four different databases comprising normophonic and pathological recordings of sustained phonation of the vowel /a/ unrestricted to a subset of vocal pathologies. Furthermore, to our best knowledge, this article is the first to explore gradient-boosted trees and deep learning for this application. The following best classification performances measured by F1 score on dedicated test set were achieved: XGBoost (0.733) using AF and MFCC, DenseNet (0.621) using MFCC, and Isolation Forest (0.610) using AF. Even though these results are of exploratory character, conducted experiments do show promising potential of gradient boosting and deep learning methods to robustly detect voice pathologies.

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  • 14 September 2019

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Acknowledgements

This study was funded by the grant of the Czech Ministry of Health 16-30805A (Effects of non-invasive brain stimulation on hypokinetic dysarthria, micrographia, and brain plasticity in patients with Parkinson’s disease) and the following projects: SIX (CZ.1.05/2.1.00/03.0072) and LO1401. For the research, infrastructure of the SIX Center was used. The authors (P. Harar, Z. Galaz) of this study also acknowledge the financial support of Erwin Schrödinger International Institute for Mathematics and Physics during their stay at the “Systematic approaches to deep learning methods for audio” workshop held from 11 September, 2017, to 15 September, 2017, in Vienna.

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  1. Brno University of Technology, Technicka 3082/12, 61 600, Brno, Czech Republic

    Pavol Harar, Zoltan Galaz, Jiri Mekyska, Radim Burget & Zdenek Smekal

  2. Institute for Technological Development and Innovation in Communications (IDeTIC), University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Parque Científico Tecnológico de la ULPGC, Polivalente II, Planta 2, 35017, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain

    Jesus B. Alonso-Hernandez

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  1. Pavol Harar
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Correspondence to Pavol Harar.

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Harar, P., Galaz, Z., Alonso-Hernandez, J.B. et al. Towards robust voice pathology detection. Neural Comput & Applic 32, 15747–15757 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00521-018-3464-7

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