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A comparison of Dysphonia Severity Index and Acoustic Voice Quality Index measures in differentiating normal and dysphonic voices

  • Laryngology
  • Published:
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Abstract

Purpose

The aim of the study was to investigate and compare the feasibility and robustness of the Acoustic Voice Quality Index (AVQI) and the Dysphonia Severity Index (DSI) in diagnostic accuracy, differentiating normal and dysphonic voices.

Methods

A group of 264 subjects with normal voices (n = 105) and with various voice disorders (n = 159) were asked to read aloud a text and to sustain the vowel /a/. Both speech tasks were concatenated, and perceptually rated for dysphonia severity by five voice clinicians. They rated the Grade (G) and the overall dysphonia severity with a visual analog scale (VAS). All concatenated voice samples were acoustically analyzed to receive an AVQI score. For DSI analysis, the required voice parameters were obtained from the sustained phonation of the vowel /a/.

Results

The results achieved significant and marked concurrent validity between both auditory-perceptual judgment procedures and both acoustic voice measures. The DSI threshold (i.e., DSI = 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 reasonable sensitivity of 70.3% and excellent specificity of 93.9%. Also, the AVQI threshold (i.e., AVQI = 3.31) pertaining to Gmean demonstrated reasonable sensitivity of 78.1% and excellent specificity of 92.0%. For VASmean, an AVQI threshold of 3.33 was determined with excellent sensitivity of 97.0% and reasonable specificity of 81.8%.

Conlusion

The outcomes of the present study indicate comparable results between DSI and AVQI with a high level of validity to discriminate between normal 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.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Otolaryngology, Lithuanian University of Health Sciences, Kaunas, Lithuania

    Virgilijus Uloza, Nora Ulozaite-Staniene & Tadas Petrauskas

  2. Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium

    Ben Barsties v. Latoszek & Youri Maryn

  3. Institute of Health Studies, HAN University of Applied Sciences, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

    Ben Barsties v. Latoszek

  4. European Institute for ORL, Sint-Augustinus Hospital, Antwerp, Belgium

    Youri Maryn

  5. Department of Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium

    Youri Maryn

  6. Faculty of Education, Health & Social Work, University College Ghent, Ghent, Belgium

    Youri Maryn

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  1. Virgilijus Uloza
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Correspondence to Nora Ulozaite-Staniene.

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The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Ethical approval

Lithuanian State Data Protection Inspectorate for Working with Personal Patient Data [No. 2R-648 (2.6-1)].

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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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Uloza, V., Latoszek, B.B.v., Ulozaite-Staniene, N. et al. A comparison of Dysphonia Severity Index and Acoustic Voice Quality Index measures in differentiating normal and dysphonic voices. Eur Arch Otorhinolaryngol 275, 949–958 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00405-018-4903-x

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