Artificial Intelligence and Benign Lesions of Vocal Folds Recognition

The development of Artificial Intelligence (AI), the evolution of voice technology, progresses in audio signal analysis, and natural language processing/understanding methods have opened the way to numerous potential applications of voice, such as the identification of vocal biomarkers for diagnosis, classification or to enhance clinical practice. More recently, researches focused on the role of the audio signal of the voice as a signature of the pathogenic process. Dysphonia indicates that some negative changes have occurred in the voice production. The overall prevalence of dysphonia is approximately 1% even if the actual rates may be higher depending on the population studied and the definition of the specific voice disorder. Voice health may be assessed by several acoustic parameters. The relationship between voice pathology and acoustic voice features has been clinically established and confirmed both quantitatively and subjectively by speech experts. The automatic systems are designed to determine whether the sample belongs to a healthy subject or a non-healthy subject. The exactness of acoustic parameters is linked to the features used to estimate them for speech noise identification. Current voice searches are mostly restricted to basic questions even if with broad perspectives. The literature on vocal biomarkers of specific vocal fold diseases is anecdotal and related to functional vocal fold disorders or rare movement disorders of the larynx . The most common causes of dysphonia are the Benign Lesions of the Vocal Fold (BLVF). Currently, videolaryngostroboscopy, although invasive, is the gold standard for the diagnosis of BLVF. However, it is invasive and expensive procedure. The novel ML algorithms have recently improved the classification accuracy of selected features in target variables when compared to more conventional procedures thanks to the ability to combine and analyze large data-sets of voice features. Even if the majority of studies focus on th