For clinical treatment of voice disorders understanding of biomechanics of the voice producing parts in the human larynx is essential. An experimental setup is suggested to determine the deformations of the human vocal folds by inducing defined forces. In a static tensile test forces are applied to the fold of an excised human hemi-larynx. The resulting surface deformations of the tissue are detected using optical stereo-triangulation. For this purpose the positions of attached location markers are recorded by two cameras and reconstructed to three-dimensional points. The deformations of the vocal folds are derived from the displacements of the location markers. The correlation of the magnitude of induced forces and the elongation of tissue were analyzed and are presented.

Index Terms. stereo-triangulation, vocal fold material parameters, hemi-larynx, vocal fold elasticity