Office Based Voice Evaluation in Assessing Outcome of Treatment in Laryngeal Disorders

Rapidly evolving global economic status has changed professional behavior. Of late, there is a drastic increase in professional voice users and thereby increase in the patients with voice disorders. Clinically, the changes in the voice can only be perceived but cannot be quantified and documented. It is therefore necessary to have a gadget/tool which is simple and with which we can document and quantify the voice change objectively. This is a prospective case control study with 50 normal control subjects (25 male and 25 female subjects) who had no voice complaints and 50 patients(cases) who presented with complaints of change in voice due to various voice pathologies, the voices were recorded from the control group and also from the cases group both pre and posttreatment and were analyzed. The disease specific frequency in various pathologies of voice pre and post treatment were documented. The degree of change in voice frequency pre and post treatment were compared with each other and with the average frequency obtained from the voices in the control group. Office based acoustic analysis can definitely be used as a simple tool for documenting voice changes on outpatient basis and it provides a dependable documented evidence with which we can even compare the results following treatment.

A Comparison of Healthy and Disordered Voices Using Multi-Dimensional Voice Program, Praat, and TF32

PURPOSE

Instrumental voice assessment plays a critical role in identifying vocal issues and for documenting treatment outcomes. The reported voice data, however, are sensitive to the algorithm used by each acoustic analysis software program (AASP) to analyze the corresponding waveform. In the present study, five acoustic measures were compared across healthy speakers and speakers with dysphonia for three AASPs commonly used in research, education, and clinical practice: Multidimensional Voice Program (MDVP) by Computerized Speech Lab, Praat, and TF32.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

Sustained vowel phonations for the quantal vowels /ɑ/, /i/, and /u/ were analyzed for 80 speakers with organic dysphonia and 60 age- and sex-matched healthy controls. Descriptive, inferential, and correlation data are reported for mean fundamental frequency (mean F0), standard deviation of fundamental frequency (SD F0), short-term perturbation measures of jitter and shimmer, and harmonic-to-noise ratio (HNR).

RESULTS

The present study replicated previous findings of interprogram differences for healthy speakers, with MDVP consistently yielding higher values than Praat and TF32 for SD F0, jitter, and shimmer and lower values for HNR. Similar, but magnified patterns of results were observed for speakers with dysphonia.

CONCLUSION

The variation observed across programs calls into question the validity in comparing voice outcomes reported by one AASP to those previously obtained by another, particularly for acoustic signals with aperiodic components that are commonly present in disordered voices. It is advised that waveforms be visually inspected prior to conducting acoustic analysis, and that voice outcomes not be combined or compared across AASPs.

Worldwide Healthy Adult Voice Baseline Parameters: A Comprehensive Review

The voice results in acoustic signals analyzed and synthetized at first for telecommunication matters, and more recently investigated for medical purposes. In particular, voice signal characteristics can evidence individual health conditions useful for screening, diagnostic and remote monitoring aims. Within this frame, the knowledge of baseline features of healthy voice is mandatory, in order to balance a comparison with their unhealthy counterpart. However, the baseline features of the human voice depend on gender, age-range and ethnicity and, as far as we know, no work reports as those features spread worldwide. This paper intends to cover this lack. Our database research yielded 179 relevant published studies, retrieved using digital libraries of IEEE Xplore, Scopus, Web of Science, Iop Science, Taylor and Francis Online, and Scitepress. These relevant studies report different features, among which here we consider the most investigated ones, within the most investigated age-range. In particular, the features are the fundamental frequency, the jitter, the shimmer, the harmonic-to-noise ratio, and the cepstral peak prominence, the most investigated age-range is within 20-40 years and, related to the ethnicity, 20 countries are considered.