Pattern Matching of Voice Quality Features from Vocal-Fold Paralysis Patients Treated with Stem-Cell Grafting

Vocal Fold Paralysis (VFP) is a secondary consequence of neck and throat surgery. A possible corrective treatment of VFP is fat injection into the paralyzed vocal fold. Recently, this technique has been modified to enrich the injection of fat with grafts of stem cells. Questions as if the implantation of fat plus stem-cells is efficient enough compared to fat-only implantation regarding phonation restoration capability may be answered using advanced speech processing and statistical pattern matching. Results from a limited study involving eight patients (four males and four females) are presented. Voice quality analysis showed that six out of the eight patients showed remarkable improvements in phonation, and that the improvements were larger when the fat grafts were enriched with stem-cells.