Intelligent vocal cord image analysis for categorizing laryngeal diseases

Abstract

Colour, shape, geometry, contrast, irregularity and roughness of the visual appearance of vocal cords are the main visual features used by a physician to diagnose laryngeal diseases. This type of examination is rather subjective and to a great extent depends on physician's experience. A decision support system for automated analysis of vocal cord images, created exploiting numerous vocal cord images can be a valuable tool enabling increased reliability of the analysis, and decreased intra- and inter-observer variability. This paper is concerned with such a system for analysis of vocal cord images. Colour, texture, and geometrical features are used to extract relevant information. A committee of artificial neural networks is then employed for performing the categorization of vocal cord images into healthy, diffuse, and nodular classes. A correct classification rate of over 93% was obtained when testing the system on 785 vocal cord images. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.