Dysphonia severity index and acoustic voice quality index measures differentiating normal

Abstract

Objective of the study was to investigate and compare the feasibility and ro - bustness of the Acoustic Voice Quality Index (AVQI) and the Dysphonia Severity Index (DSI) in diagnostic accuracy, differentiating normal and dysphonic voices. Methods . Voice recordings of 264 subjects with normal voices (n = 105) and with various voice disorders (n = 159) including standard text and sustained vowel /a/ were perceptually rated for dysphonia severity using Grade (G) and the over - all dysphonia severity with a visual analog scale (VAS) by five voice clinicians. All concatenated voice samples were acoustically analyzed to receive an AVQI score. For DSI analysis, the required voice parameters were obtained from the sustained vowel /a/. Results achieved significant and marked concurrent validity between both au - ditory-perceptual judgment procedures and both acoustic voice measures. The DSI threshold of 3.30 pertaining to Gmean obtained reasonable sensitivity of 85.8% and specificity of 83.4%. For VASmean, the DSI threshold of 3.30 was determined also with sensitivity of 70.3% and specificity of 93.9%. The AVQI threshold of 3.31 pertaining to Gmean demonstrated sensitivity of 78.1% and specificity of 92.0%. For VASmean, an AVQI threshold of 3.33 was determined with sensitivity of 97.0% and specificity of 81.8%. Conclusions . The outcomes of the present study indicate comparable results between DSI and AVQI with a high level of validity to discriminate between nor - mal and dysphonic voices. However, a higher level of accuracy was yielded for AVQI as a correlate of auditory perceptual judgment suggesting a reliable voice screening potential of AVQI.