PVR-Vocoder: A Pathological Voice Repair Vocoder for Voice Disorders.

Vocoder-based speech synthesis has become a promising technique to accommodate the demands of high-quality speech analysis, manipulation, and synthesis. However, most existing works focus on how to synthesize normal human voice with high signal-to-noise ratio, neglecting individuals' pathological voice disorder in speech interaction. In this work, we propose a non-linear voice repair vocoder for pathological vowels and sentences, which takes the pathological speech as input and generates high-quality repaired speech. Our approach is specifically designed to enhance the speech quality and intelligibility for individuals with voice disorders. We employ amplitude modulated-frequency modulated (AM-FM) and Teager energy operation techniques to enhance the quality of pitch and spectral envelope. To tackle the instability and fracture problem of pitch, we present spectral tracking algorithm, which not only avoids dramatic change in the edge of voice, but also reduces the errors of half-pitch. Furthermore, we design a spectral reconstruction algorithm, which can effectively rebuild the spectral structure by energy operation to accomplish spectral envelope repair. The proposed PVR-Vocoder shows exceptional performance in pathological voice intelligibility enhancement according to various quality measures including objective indicators, subjective evaluation, and spectrum observations.

A General Survey of Pharynlaryngeal Diseases and Voice Disorders Among Basic Education Teachers in Tianjin.

OBJECTIVE: In this study, we created a city-wide database of pharynlaryngeal diseases and voice disorders among basic education teachers to analyze the incidence, distribution, and risk factors of pharynlaryngeal diseases and voice disorders. METHODS: A total of 47,823 teachers in primary and secondary schools and kindergartens of Tianjin were enrolled in this study and underwent questionnaires and throat examinations. In addition, the data were subjected to descriptive statistics, chi-square analysis, and univariate and multivariate logistic regression analyses. RESULTS: Pharynlaryngeal diseases and voice disorders had an overall prevalence of 69.42% among basic education teachers in Tianjin, wherein the prevalence of chronic pharyngitis, chronic hyperplastic laryngitis, and chronic simple laryngitis were the highest at 39.45%, 19.80%, and 15.59%, respectively. The results of multivariate logistic regression analysis suggest that pharynlaryngeal diseases and voice disorders were statistically correlated with gender (P < 0.001), years of teaching (P < 0.001), school district (P < 0.001), class size (P < 0.001), subjective assessment of teachers on vocal loudness (P < 0.001), neck and shoulder discomfort (P < 0.001), smoking (P < 0.001), psychological stress (P = 0.002), and frequent habitual throat clearing (P < 0.001). Furthermore, the risk factors for pharynlaryngeal diseases and voice disorders were age (P = 0.002), school district (P < 0.001), class size (P = 0.008), neck and shoulder discomfort (P = 0.038), smoking (P < 0.001), water intake habits during class (P = 0.023), and frequent habitual throat clearing (P = 0.001) for male teachers, and for female teachers, it was age (P < 0.001), school district (P < 0.001), daily teaching hours (P = 0.005), class size (P < 0.001), subjective assessment of teachers on vocal loudness (P < 0.001), neck and shoulder discomfort (P < 0.001), smoking (P = 0.033), psychological stress (P = 0.003), and frequent habitual throat clearing (P < 0.001). CONCLUSION: Due to the high prevalence of pharynlaryngeal diseases and voice disorders among basic education teachers, throat and voice health education-related activities should be conducted for teachers to intervene in the occurrence of pharynlaryngeal diseases and voice disorders at an early stage.

GBNF-VAE: A Pathological Voice Enhancement Model Based on Gold Section for Bottleneck Feature With Variational Autoencoder.

OBJECTIVE: Speech enhancement has become a promising technique to accommodate demands of the improvement in quality of a degraded speech signal. The main works now focus on separating normal speech from noise, but have neglected the low quality of impaired speech influenced by anomalous glottis flow. In order to effectively enhance the pathological speech, it is essential to design a separation mechanism for extracting high-dimensional timbre features and speech features separately to suppress low-dimensional noises. METHODS: In this paper, we propose an enhancement model GBNF-VAE to extract timbre efficiently by reducing anomalous airflow noise interference, and by combining the semantic features with timbre features to synthesize the enhanced speech. In particular, the bottleneck feature can characterize the timbre by the controlled number of nodes through the Golden Section method, which effectively improves computational efficiency. In addition, variational autoencoder is adopted to extract semantic features which are combined with the previous timbre features to synthesize the enhanced speech. RESULTS: Finally, spectrum observation, objective indicators and subjective evaluation all show the outstanding performance of GBNF-VAE in pathological speech quality enhancement.

HAGLROS knockdown restrained cell proliferation, migration and invasion and facilitated apoptosis in laryngeal cancer via miR-138-5p/CLN5 axis.

BACKGROUND: This work investigated the role of HAGLROS in laryngeal cancer (LC). METHODS: HAGLROS expression in the head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSC), target miRNAs of HAGLROS, target mRNAs of miR-138-5p, and the binding sites of HAGLROS and miR-138-5p or CLN5 and miR-138-5p were predicted through bioinformatics. HAGLROS, miR-138-5p, CLN5, Bcl-2, and Bax levels were detected by qRT-PCR and Western blot. The biological functions of LC cells were assessed through CCK-8, colony formation assays, transwell assay, and flow cytometry assay. The targeting relationship between HAGLROS and miR-138-5p or CLN5 and miR-138-5p was confirmed by dual luciferase gene reporter analysis. RESULTS: HAGLROS was upregulated in LC. HAGLROS-specific small interfering RNA (Si-HAGLROS) inhibited the viability, proliferation, migration, and invasion while increased the apoptosis in LC cells. MiR-138-5p was a target of HAGLROS and the miR-138-5p inhibitor reversed the effects of si-HAGLROS on LC cells. CLN5 was a target of miR-138-5p. MiR-138-5p inhibitor raised the viability, migration and invasion, and Bcl-2 expression while declined Bax expression in LC cells, with si-CLN5 performing the opposite effects and reversing the effects of miR-138-5p inhibitor. CONCLUSION: Silenced HAGLROS restrained the LC cells' abilities to proliferate, migrate, and invade as well as facilitated apoptosis in LC via miR-138-5p/CLN5 axis.

Chaos Behavior Analysis of Alaryngeal Voices Including Esophageal and Tracheoesophageal Voices.

HYPOTHESIS/OBJECTIVES: This study's objective was to develop a method to evaluate the chaotic characteristic of alaryngeal speech. The proposed method will be capable of distinguishing between normal and alaryngeal voices, including esophageal (SE) and tracheoesophageal (TE) voices. It has been previously shown that alaryngeal voices exhibit chaotic characteristics due to the aperiodicity of their signals. The proposed method will be applied for future use to quantify both chaos behavior (CB) and the difference between SE and TE voices. STUDY DESIGN: A total of 74 voice recordings including 34 normal and 40 alaryngeal (26 SE and 14 TE) were used in the study. Voice samples were analyzed to distinguish alaryngeal voices from normal voices and to investigate different chaotic characteristics of SE and TE speech. METHODS: A chaotic distribution detection-based method was used to investigate the CB of alaryngeal voices. This CB was used to detect the difference between SE and TE voice types. Quantification of the CB parameter was performed. Statistical analyses were used to compare the results of the CB analysis for both the SE and TE voices. RESULTS: Statistical analysis revealed that CB effectively differentiated between all normal and alaryngeal voice types (p < 0.01). Subsequent multiclass receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis demonstrated that CB (area under the curve) possessed the greatest classification accuracy relative to correlation dimension (D2). CONCLUSIONS: The CB metric shows strong promise as an accurate, useful metric for objective differentiation between all normal and alaryngaeal, SE and TE voice types. The CB calculations showed expected results, as SE voices have significantly more CB than TE voices, constituting substantial improvement over previous methods and becoming the first SE and TE classification method. This metric can help clinicians obtain additional acoustic information when monitoring the efficacy of treatment for patients undergoing total laryngectomies.

Lipid-Polymer Hybrid Nanoparticle-Based Combination Treatment with Cisplatin and EGFR/HER2 Receptor-Targeting Afatinib to Enhance the Treatment of Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma.

PURPOSE: Nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) is one of the most prevalent carcinomas among the Cantonese population of South China and Southeast Asia (responsible for 8% of all cancers in China alone). Although concurrent platinum-based chemotherapy and radiotherapy have been successful, metastatic NPC remains difficult to treat, and the failure rate is high. METHODS: Thus, we developed stable lipid-polymer hybrid nanoparticles (NPs) containing cisplatin (CDDP) and afatinib (AFT); these drugs act synergistically to counter NPC. The formulated nanoparticles were subjected to detailed in vitro and in vivo analysis. RESULTS: We found that CDDP and AFT exhibited synergistic anticancer efficacy at a specific molar ratio. NPs were more effective than a free drug cocktail (a combination) in reducing cell viability, enhancing apoptosis, inhibiting cell migration, and blocking cell cycling. Cell viability after CDDP monotherapy was as high as 85.1%, but CDDP+AFT (1/1 w/w) significantly reduced viability to 39.5%. At 1 µg/mL, AFT/CDDP-loaded lipid-polymer hybrid NPs (ACD-LP) were significantly more cytotoxic than the CDDP+AFT cocktail, indicating the superiority of the NP system. CONCLUSION: The NPs significantly delayed tumor growth compared with either CDDP or AFT monotherapy and were not obviously toxic. Overall, the results suggest that AFT/CDDP-loaded lipid-polymer hybrid NPs exhibit great potential as a treatment for NPC.

Hsa_circ_0057481 promotes laryngeal cancer proliferation and migration by modulating the miR-200c/ZEB1 axis.

As a new type of non-coding RNA, circular RNAs (circRNAs) have been reported to be important regulators of tumor initiation and progression. By using the high-throughput microarray, a recent study demonstrated that the expression of hsa_circ_0057481 is upregulated in human laryngeal cancer. In the present study, we aimed to elucidate the role of hsa_circ_0057481 in laryngeal cancer. We found that hsa_circ_0057481 was significantly upregulated in laryngeal cancer tissues compared with healthy normal specimens. Silencing of hsa_circ_0057481 by siRNAs suppressed cell growth, cell cycle progression, invasive and migration potential, and promoted cell apoptosis in laryngeal cancer HEP-2 and TU212 cells. Mechanistically, hsa_circ_0057481 directly sponges miR-200c in HEP-2 cells. Knockdown of hsa_circ_0057481 suppressed the expression of ZEB1, a best-known target of miR-200c. Moreover, the oncogenic effects of hsa_circ_0057481 were partly dependent on its inhibition on miR-200c. Taken together, our findings showed that hsa_circ_0057481 might act as a novel therapeutic target in laryngeal cancer.