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Comparison of Pitch Strength With Perceptual and Other Acoustic Metric Outcome Measures Following Medialization Laryngoplasty
Journal article   Peer reviewed

Comparison of Pitch Strength With Perceptual and Other Acoustic Metric Outcome Measures Following Medialization Laryngoplasty

Adam D. Rubin, Cristina Jackson-Menaldi, Lisa M. Kopf, Katherine Marks, Jean Skeffington, Mark D. Skowronski, Rahul Shrivastav and Eric J. Hunter
Journal of voice, Vol.33(5), pp.795-800
09/01/2019
DOI: 10.1016/j.jvoice.2018.03.019
PMCID: 6336519
PMID: 29773324
url
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/6336519View
Open Access

Abstract

Introduction. The diagnoses of voice disorders, as well as treatment outcomes, are often tracked using visual (eg, stroboscopic images), auditory (eg, perceptual ratings), objective (eg, from acoustic or aerodynamic signals), and patient report (eg, Voice Handicap Index and Voice-Related Quality of Life) measures. However, many of these measures are known to have low to moderate sensitivity and specificity for detecting changes in vocal characteristics, including vocal quality. Objective. The objective of this study was to compare changes in estimated pitch strength (PS) with other conventionally used acoustic measures based on the cepstral peak prominence (smoothed cepstral peak prominence, cepstral spectral index of dysphonia, and acoustic voice quality index), and clinical judgments of voice quality (GRBAS [grade, roughness, breathiness, asthenia, strain] scale) following laryngeal framework surgery. Methods. This study involved post hoc analysis of recordings from 22 patients pretreatment and post treatment (thyroplasty and behavioral therapy). Sustained vowels and connected speech were analyzed using objective measures (PS, smoothed cepstral peak prominence, cepstral spectral index of dysphonia, and acoustic voice quality index), and these results were compared withmean auditory-perceptual ratings by expert clinicians using the GRBAS scale. Results. All four acoustic measures changed significantly in the direction that usually indicates improved voice quality following treatment (P<0.005). Grade and breathiness correlated the strongest with the acoustic measures (vertical bar r vertical bar similar to 0.7) with strain being the least correlated. Conclusions. Acoustic analysis on running speech highly correlates with judged ratings. PS is a robust, easily obtained acoustic measure of voice quality that could be useful in the clinical environment to follow treatment of voice disorders.
Audiology & Speech-Language Pathology Life Sciences & Biomedicine Otorhinolaryngology Science & Technology

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