.Abstract – While there are many benefits to minimally invasive surgery (MIS), force feedback, or touch sensation, is limited in the currently available MIS tools, including surgical robots, creating the potential for excessive force application during surgery and unintended tissue injury. The goal of this work was to develop a methodology with which to identify stress magnitudes and durations that can be safely applied with a MIS grasper to different tissues, potentially improving MIS device design and reducing potentially adverse clinically relevant consequences. Using the porcine model, stresses typically applied in MIS were applied to liver, ureter, and small bowel using a motorized endoscopic grasper. Acute indicators of tissue damage including cellular death and infiltration of inflammatory cells were measured using histological and image analysis techniques. Finite element analysis was used to identify

Voice quality, defined by John Laver as the characteristic auditory colouring of a speaker’s voice, is a significant feature of speech, and it is used to signal various properties such as emotions, intentions, and mood of the speaker. While voice quality measurement techniques and algorithms have been developed, much work is needed to obtain a comprehensive view of the function and analysis of human voice in the production of different voice qualities. Two major research questions are presented in this thesis: First, how can the most important laryngeal voice quality features be analyzed, and second, how do the voice quality features affect different facets of vocal expression? To answer these questions, five separate studies of the analysis methodology and two studies regarding the voice quality behaviour were