Investigation of Relation Between Hypoxic-Ischemic Encephalopathy and Spectral Features of Infant Cry Audio

Mehmet Satar; Caglar Cengizler; Serif Hamitoglu; Mustafa Ozdemir

doi:10.1016/j.jvoice.2022.05.015

Investigation of Relation Between Hypoxic-Ischemic Encephalopathy and Spectral Features of Infant Cry Audio

J Voice. 2022 Jun 24:S0892-1997(22)00147-3. doi: 10.1016/j.jvoice.2022.05.015. Online ahead of print.

Authors

Mehmet Satar¹, Caglar Cengizler², Serif Hamitoglu³, Mustafa Ozdemir³

Affiliations

¹ Division of Neonatology, Department of Pediatrics, Medical School, Cukurova University, Adana, Turkey. Electronic address: msatar@cu.edu.tr.
² Electric and Energy Program, AOSB Technical Sciences Vocational School, Cukurova University, Adana, Turkey.
³ Division of Neonatology, Department of Pediatrics, Medical School, Cukurova University, Adana, Turkey.

PMID: 35760634
DOI: 10.1016/j.jvoice.2022.05.015

Abstract

Despite advances in medical technologies, Hypoxic-Ischemic Encephalopathy (HIE) continues to be a problem for neonatal intensive care units. Analysis of crying sounds may be a valuable tool for predicting neonatal disease. However, the characteristics of crying in newborns with HIE are still unclear. One of the factors limiting the ability to focus on that subject is the lack of commercially available infant cry database for research. Also, another reason that complicates the classification is the varying characteristics of infant cry. Accordingly, crying sounds were recorded from 35 infants and demographic characteristics of the study groups are presented as well as the numerical representation of spectral features. Experiments reveal that the existence of HIE causes distinctive variation in energy, energy entropy and spectral centroid features of the utterances; which leads us to conclude that the presented combination of spectral features would function well with any supervised or unsupervised machine learning algorithm.

Keywords: Cry; Diagnosis; Hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy; Newborn; Spectral.