The quality of cleft lip and palate (CLP) speech is affected due to hyper-nasality and mis-articulation. Surgery and speech therapy are required to correct the structural and functional defects of CLP, which will result in an enhanced speech signal. The quality of the enhanced speech is perceptually evaluated by speech-language pathologists and results are highly biased. In this work, a signal ...

Nasality is a very important characteristic of several languages, European Portuguese being one of them. This paper addresses the challenge of nasality detection in surface electromyography (EMG) based speech interfaces. We explore the existence of useful information about the velum movement and also assess if muscles deeper down in the face and neck region can be measured using surface electro...

Objective: The main purpose of this study is to determine the treatment effectiveness of pharyngeal flap surgery by measuring speech outcome 1 year after surgery. The authors hypothesized that flap surgery is an effective technique for velopharyngeal inadequacy resulting in improved intelligibility, decreased hypernasality and nasalance scores and normal voice characteristics. Patients and Meth...

A Silent Speech Interface (SSI) aims at performing Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) in the absence of an intelligible acoustic signal. It can be used as a human-computer interaction modality in high-backgroundnoise environments, such as living rooms, or in aiding speech-impaired individuals, increasing in prevalence with ageing. If this interaction modality is made available for users own nat...

results utilizing autologous stem cell populations to treat craniofacial defects is a promising field of ongoing investigations. studies show that cartilage stem/progenitor cells (cspcs) are highly chondrogenic and can produce elastic reconstructive material with long-term tissue restoration. conclusions auricular reconstruction surgery is a challenging plastic procedure that requires great exp...

This paper presents a new modified technique for ear and eyebrow reconstruction which was used to reconstruct facial injuries caused by burns, excision of malignant tumors, depressed traumatic scars and a low hairline defect around the auricular region.' Other facial reconstructions carried out by this procedure were also highly successful and without complications.