Fernández Pozo, RubénBlanco Murillo, Jose LHernández Gómez, LuisLópez Gonzalo, EduardoAlcázar Ramírez, JoséToledano, Doroteo T2012-10-162012-10-162009-06-14Fernández Pozo R, Blanco Murillo JL, Hernández Gómez L, López Gonzalo E, Alcázar Ramírez J , Toledano DT. Assessment of Severe Apnoea through Voice Analysis, Automatic Speech, and Speaker Recognition Techniques. EURASIP J Adv Signal Process. 2009:9825311687-6172http://hdl.handle.net/10668/573This article is part of the series Analysis and Signal Processing of Oesophageal and Pathological Voices.This study is part of an ongoing collaborative effort between the medical and the signal processing communities to promote research on applying standard Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) techniques for the automatic diagnosis of patients with severe obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA). Early detection of severe apnoea cases is important so that patients can receive early treatment. Effective ASR-based detection could dramatically cut medical testing time. Working with a carefully designed speech database of healthy and apnoea subjects, we describe an acoustic search for distinctive apnoea voice characteristics. We also study abnormal nasalization in OSA patients by modelling vowels in nasal and nonnasal phonetic contexts using Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) pattern recognition on speech spectra. Finally, we present experimental findings regarding the discriminative power of GMMs applied to severe apnoea detection. We have achieved an 81% correct classification rate, which is very promising and underpins the interest in this line of inquiry.enPrograma informático para el reconocimiento del lenguaje habladoApnea del sueño obstructivaDistribución normalTrastornos de la vozMedical Subject Headings::Information Science::Information Science::Computing Methodologies::Software::Speech Recognition SoftwareMedical Subject Headings::Diseases::Respiratory Tract Diseases::Respiration Disorders::Apnea::Sleep Apnea Syndromes::Sleep Apnea, ObstructiveMedical Subject Headings::Phenomena and Processes::Mathematical Concepts::Statistical Distributions::Normal DistributionMedical Subject Headings::Diseases::Otorhinolaryngologic Diseases::Laryngeal Diseases::Voice Disordersresearch articleopen access10.1155/2009/982531