The first grid for the oral and maxillofacial region and its application for speech analysis.

<bold>Objectives: </bold>Introduction of a new grid-based method for analyzing speech functions which takes into account the related information of patients' data and the oral air flow with pronouncing analyzed by computational fluid dynamics.<bold>Methods: </bold>An on-line speech analyzer was developed for clinical use utilizing GridPort2.3.1 based on globus2.4.2, comprising several computational tools such as unified data storage, semantic data analysis, computational fluid dynamics analysis and three-dimensional visualization of calculated results from different hardware sources with various types of operation systems.<bold>Results: </bold>The power transportation layer between dental clinics and computational and storage resources could be provided by using a WWW-based portal. The backend data management system could be constructed using a storage resource broker (SRB) and extensible mark up language (XML).<bold>Conclusions: </bold>The new method allows the construction of a data warehouse through this grid-based speech function analysis in order to extract the principal factors related to speech disorders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]