Speech intelligibility estimation using multi-resolution spectral features for speakers undergoing cancer treatment

Abstract

Head and neck cancer can significantly hamper speech production which often reduces speech intelligibility. A method of extracting spectral features is presented. The method uses a multi-resolution sinusoidal transform scheme, which enables better representation of spectral and harmonic characteristics. Regression methods were used to predict interval-scaled intelligibility scores of utterances in the NKI-CCRT speech corpus. The inclusion of these features lowered the mean squared estimation error from 0.43 to 0.39 on a scale from 1 to 7, with a p-value less than 0.001. For binary intelligibility classification, their inclusion resulted in an improvement by 5.0 percentage points when tested on a disjoint set.

Effects of oral and oropharyngeal cancer on speech intelligibility using acoustic analysis: Systematic review

“…Among the 22 studies, 10 include more than 20 patients, and also 10 include between 2 and 18 subjects . Two articles do not report the number of subjects involved in the acoustic analysis .…”

“…Six studies (27%) include both patients treated for cancer of the oral cavity and patients treated for oropharynx cancer …”

“…Regarding the size of the tumor, 12 studies (54%) include smaller tumors (T1 + T2) than large ones . Three studies (14%) focus on larger tumors (T3 + T4) . One study (5%) includes as many subjects with small T1 + T2 tumors than with larger T3 + T4 tumors (T3 + T4) .…”

“…Among them, surgery was carried out exclusively (with no reported information about complementary treatment) in 14 studies, including seven surgical reconstructions . Surgery was combined with other treatment methods such as radiotherapy or chemotherapy in six studies . Finally, a radiochemotherapy without surgical treatment was performed for the participants of two studies (9%) …”

“…The main languages spoken by the subjects and thus constituting the speech sample are English (including American English and Canadian English) and Dutch in four studies, respectively . The remaining studies are all carried out in different languages: French, Portuguese, German, Finnish, Hindi, Japanese, and Korean .…”