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Individuals reporting episodes of breathing problems caused by re-occurring variable airflow obstructions in the larynx have been described in an increasing number of publications, with more than 40 different terms being used without consensus on definitions. This lack of an international consensus on nomenclature is a serious obstacle for the development of the area, as knowledge from different centres cannot be matched, pooled or readily utilised by others. Thus, an international Task Force has been created, led by the European Respiratory Society/European Laryngological Society/American College of Chest Physicians. This review describes the methods used to reach an international consensus on the subject and the resulting nomenclature, the 2013 international consensus conference nomenclature.

This paper presents an analysis system aiming at discriminating between normal and pathological voices. Compared to literature of voice pathology assessment, it is characterised by two aspects. First the system is based on features inspired from voice pathology assessment and music information retrieval. Second the distinction between normal and pathological voices is simply based on the correlation between acoustic features, while more complex classifiers are common in literature. Based on the normal and pathological samples included the MEEI database, it has been found that using two features (spectral decrease and first spectral tristimulus in the Bark scale) and their correlation leads to correct classification rates of 94.7% for pathological voices and 89.5% for normal ones. The system also outputs a normal/pathological factor aiming at giving an indication to the clinician about the location of a subject according to the database.