Automatic quantification of speech intelligibility of adults with oral squamous cell carcinoma.
OBJECTIVE
It has been the aim of the present study to introduce a novel automatic technique for the objective and quantitative assessment of speech intelligibility to the evaluation of postoperative outcome.


METHODS
Forty-six patients with oral carcinomas, mean age 59.8 +/- 10.1 years, and an age-matched control group of 40 subjects without oral diseases. Recordings of a standard text read by the patients and the control group were analyzed by an automatic speech recognition system.


RESULTS
For the patients, automatic speech recognition yielded word recognition rates between 8 and 82% (mean 49 +/- 19%), for the control group between 60 and 91% (76 +/- 7%). Automatic evaluation closely correlated with the experts' perceptual evaluation of intelligibility (r = -0.93; p < 0.01). The multi-rater kappa of the experts alone (0.55) differed only slightly from the multi-rater kappa of the experts and the speech recognition system (0.58).


CONCLUSIONS
For adults with speech disorders, automatic speech recognition may serve as a valuable tool to assess global speech outcome after treatment of oral squamous cell carcinoma objectively and quantitatively for clinical and research purposes.
Windrich
M
M
Department of Phoniatrics and Pediatric Audiology, Universitatsklinikum Erlangen, Erlangen, Germany.
Maier
A
A
Kohler
R
R
Noth
E
E
Nkenke
E
E
Eysholdt
U
U
Schuster
M
M
D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D001332:Automatism; D002294:Carcinoma, Squamous Cell / Q000150:complications*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009062:Mouth Neoplasms / Q000150:complications*; D013064:Speech Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000453:epidemiology / Q000209:etiology*; D013065:Speech Intelligibility; D013067:Speech Perception