Characterization of Pathologic Cries of Newborns Based on Fundamental Frequency Estimation

Yasmina Kheddache,Chakib Tadj

doi:10.4236/eng.2013.510b057

Abstract

The majority of the sick babies seem in good health at birth and early diagnosis of the various pathologies that can afflict newborn is crucial. For this reason we introduce in this paper the use of the fundamental frequency and the different modes of cries as Hyper-phonation, phonation and high pitched cries to differentiate the pathological cries from the cries of the healthy babies. The automatic estimation of these characteristics enabled us to establish a quantitative characterization of healthy newborn cries and pathologic newborn cries. The results obtained agree with the spectrographic analysis carried out on the healthy and pathologic cries of the newborns.

Highlights

For many researchers, the fundamental frequency F0 which represents the speed of opening and closure of the vocal folds [1] is considered as the most important in the perception of the infant’s cries by adults
The majority of the sick babies seem in good health at birth and early diagnosis of the various pathologies that can afflict newborn is crucial
For this reason we introduce in this paper the use of the fundamental frequency and the different modes of cries as Hyper-phonation, phonation and high pitched cries to differentiate the pathological cries from the cries of the healthy babies

Summary

Introduction

The fundamental frequency F0 which represents the speed of opening and closure of the vocal folds [1] is considered as the most important in the perception of the infant’s cries by adults. Cry analysis can be an additional tool in the clinical diagnosis of newborn. The fundamental frequency of newborn cry has been found to be a discriminative characteristic in several medical problems [1]. Cry analysis presented in this paper falls within the research on the relationship between the disease and the characteristics of the cry. The main objective of this work is to analyze cries of healthy and newborn with different categories of diseases in order to evaluate a fundamental frequency of these cries. We establish quantitative relationships between the different modes of cries and studied pathology

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion