Acoustic and Aerodynamic Clusters Within Primary Muscle Tension Dysphonia

Area of Science:

• Laryngology
• Speech-Language Pathology
• Computational Acoustics

Background:

• Primary muscle tension dysphonia (pMTD) is a vocal hyperfunction without vocal fold tissue damage.
• Diagnosing pMTD is challenging due to a lack of clear structural or neurological causes and variable acoustic/aerodynamic data.

Purpose of the Study:

• To identify patient subgroups within primary muscle tension dysphonia (pMTD) using acoustic and aerodynamic measurements.
• To apply computational methods for a more objective analysis of pMTD characteristics.

Main Methods:

• Retrospective chart review of 72 pMTD patients.
• Exploratory factor analysis to identify principal axes in voice data.
• K-means clustering analysis based on factor scores.

Main Results:

• Factor analysis revealed three principal axes: aperiodicity, fundamental frequency, and aerodynamics, explaining 44.7% of variance.
• Four patient clusters were identified: high aperiodicity, low fundamental frequency, high fundamental frequency, and high aerodynamic values.
• The identified clusters are reliable and align with previous research.

Conclusions:

• The study successfully identified distinct subgroups within the pMTD population.
• These findings provide a foundation for future subtype classification of pMTD.
• Further clustering analyses with new samples are warranted.