Diagnostic Accuracy of Acoustic Voice Quality Index Version 02.03 in Discriminating across the Perceptual Degrees of Dysphonia Severity in Kannada Language

Abstract

Background : Acoustic Voice Quality Index (AVQI) has been reported to be a sensitive tool for discriminating between the normal and dysphonic voices, however, there is a dearth of research focused on investigating the diagnostic accuracy of AVQI in discriminating across the perceptual categories of dysphonia severity ie, slight, moderate, and severe. Hence, the present study is a preliminary attempt to document the AVQI across the degrees of dysphonia severity and to verify whether the AVQI can discriminate across these degrees of perceptual dysphonia severity. Method: A total of 71 dysphonic samples extracted from the clinical database of the institute and 19 prospectively recorded normophonic samples consisting of sustained vowel /a/ and a sentence from a standardized Kannada passage served as input data. These 90 samples were categorized into four categories based on the overall grade of perceptual dysphonia (G) as normal, slight, moderate, or severe by three experienced speech language pathologists in a randomized and double-blinded manner, which served as the ground truth. The AVQI was calculated from the samples using Praat version 6.0.40 and the AVQI script version 2.03. Results: The Spearman's correlation test revealed a positive correlation between the G and the AVQI (r?=?0.67; P < 0.001). The Receiver Operating Characteristics analysis revealed that the AVQI could accurately discriminate across the perceptual subcategories of dysphonia. Conclusions: The results of the present study revealed that AVQI is a robust multiparametric measure which can accurately discriminate across the subcategories of the perceptual dysphonia severity with reasonable precision. Further, the AVQI is also shown to be promising in evaluating the signals with higher levels of aperiodicity such as severe hoarse voice quality.