List of Articles by Author

1. Islami A, Sokoli D, Bicaj T, Staka G. Comparison of the Nasality of the Unoperated Soft Cleft Palate Patient, with and without Obturator. Acta Stomatol Croat. 2002;36(3):318.
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   Title in English:	Comparison of the Nasality of the Unoperated Soft Cleft Palate Patient, with and without Obturator
   Title in Croatian:	nema
   Type of Article:	congress abstract
   MeSH:	CLEFT PALATE + rehabilitation PALATAL OBTURATORS
   Abstract:	Prosthetic rehabilitation of the patient with a cleft soft palate has three main objectives. Foremost is the need to improve the function of speech and comfortable swallowing, that are impaired by the potency of the soft palate, which allows the escape of air or fluid into the nasopharynx and nasal cavity. Unrepaired clefts of the soft palate produce a deficient velar-pharyngeal seal and require the construction of an obturator toward the speech bulb. Measurement of the nasality of a patient wearing a speech bulb for 18 years is described in this paper. This was done by means of Nasal View System, Tiger Electronics Inc. (Seattle, WA), which developed this system based on the work of Awan (1996, 1997). The Nasal View system is a PC/Windows based system, which enables the recording of high-resolution speech signals using Windows compatible sound cards (sampling at up to 44100 Hz at 8 or 16 bits of resolution). The hardware components included in the Nasal View system include headgear and a portable custom dual-channel pre-amplification unit.The key component of the headgear is a rigid plate, constructed of 5 mm thick styrene, which is used to separate an oral from a nasal microphone. The special sentence was used for our assessment.In this sentence 5 sounds out of 28 are nasal sounds (17.86%). The results are as follows: With the obturator in place the values of nasality were: Ave 19.32% SD 14.31%, Max 66.53% Min 1.28% Median 15.04% Mode 12.70%. The measurements of nasality without the obturator were: Ave 41.31% SD 24.39% Max 97.03% Min 7.61%Median 30.02% Mode 23.26%. Nasality measurement is displayed in the histogram of the nasality distribution, in the real-time analysis,power spectrum, LPC spectrum power and LPC spectrum, and in spectrograms.