Primary prosthetic voice restoration by performing tracheoesophageal puncture (TEP) and immediate insertion of a voice prosthesis at the time of total laryngectomy (TLE) is presently the method of choice. This enables the easiest and most comfortable voice rehabilitation with the patient still under general anesthesia when the first prosthesis is inserted. Reconstruction of the pharynx with e.g...

I NTRODUCT ION A class of natural language processors is described which allow a user to display objects of interest on a computer terminal and manipulate them via typed or spoken English sentences. This paper concerns itself with the implementation of the voice input facility using an automatic speech recognizer, and the touch input facility using a touch sensitive screen. To overcome the high...

The goal of speech enhancement varies according to specific applications, such as to reduce listener fatigue, to boost the overall speech quality, to increase intelligibility, and to improve the performance of the voice communication device. This paper presents Multiscale principal component analysis (MSPCA) for denoising of single channel speech signal. Principle Component Analysis (PCA) is a ...

A bioreactor refers to any manufactured or engineered device that supports a biologically active environment. These kinds of reactors are designed to treat wastewater treatment. Volumetric mass transfer coefficient and the effect of superficial gas velocity, as the most important operational factor on hydrodynamics, in three-phase airlift reactors are investigated in this study. The experiments...

A Digital Voice Systems AMBE-2020 voice coder (vocoder) has been implemented as a functional replacement for the obsolete AMBE-1000. The effort, in part, was a capstone senior design project in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Temple University, which fosters advanced technical topics in undergraduate education using amateur radio. The implementation is open-source and complies with the d...

BACKGROUND A new device is described for secondary tracheoesophageal puncture (TEP). We hypothesize that the device can be used to create the puncture, size, and insert the voice prosthesis in antegrade fashion in a single procedure suitable for office-based use. METHODS A measurement and insertion device (MAID) was designed with the hypothesis in mind and tested on 3 pigs while they were und...