Hearing-impaired listeners often have great difficulty understanding speech in situations with background noise (e.g., meetings, parties). Conventional hearing aids offer insufficient directivity to significantly reduce background noise relative to the desired speech signal. Based on array techniques, microphone prototypes have been developed with strongly directional characteristics to be inco...

Twenty three normal-hearing candidates for the Submarine Force were examined for Speech Reception Threshold (SRT) by speech audiometry using phonetically-balanced (PB) lists of monosyllables instead of the usual spondee words. Such PB words are felt to be considerably better in assessing the important frequency regions for daily speech communication, namely, 500-2000 cycles per second. The Navy...

Measures of speech intelligibility are an essential tool for diagnosing hearing impairment and for tuning hearing aid parameters. This study explores the potential of automatic speech recognition (ASR) for conducting autonomous listening tests. In these tests (e.g., in the Oldenburg sentence matrix test employed here) the responses of participants are usually logged by a (human) supervisor. The...

In many studies, the influence of intelligibility of the interfering speech is avoided by reversing it in time. Usually, intelligibility with time-reversed interfering speech indeed is higher compared to that with normal interfering speech. However, due to the nature of speech, reversed speech also gives rise to increased forward masking. The latter will result in a decrease in intelligibility....

introduction: in developing countries, chronic otitis media (com) and cholesteatoma are relatively prevalent.  within the field of otology, com surgery remains one of the most common surgical treatments. most recent studies evaluating the potential prognostic factors in com surgery have addressed graft success rate and types of middle ear and mastoid pathology. there has been much controversy a...

Stereotactic radiosurgery (SRS) and fractionated stereotactic radiotherapy (SRT) have been recognized as an alternative to surgery for small to medium sized vestibular schwannoma (VS). This study analysed and compared the outcomes of VS treated with the first Thailand installation of a dedicated Linac-based stereotactic radiation machine using single-fraction radiosurgery (SRS), hypofraction st...

The aim of this study was to evaluate the impact of actual rotational setup errors on dose distributions in intracranial stereotactic radiotherapy (SRT) with different alternatives for treatment position selection. A total of 38 SRT fractions from 18patients were retrospectively evaluated with rotational setup errors obtained from actual treatments. The planning computed tomography (CT) images ...

Three experiments were performed to evaluate the use of subjective intelligibility estimations as a method for measuring hearing aid benefit. Subjective and objective speech intelligibility scores were compared for young normal-hearing and elderly hearing-impaired listeners. Objective intelligibility scores were obtained using the Connected Speech Test (CST). This test consists of conversationa...

BACKGROUND/AIMS The aim of the present study is to construct a simple method for visualizing and quantifying the audibility of speech on the audiogram and to predict speech intelligibility. The proposed method involves a series of indices on the audiogram form reflecting the sound pressure level distribution of running speech. The indices that coincide with a patient's pure tone thresholds refl...