[Preliminary study of acoustic and aerodynamic parameters after Tucker frontal anterior laryngectomy]

Currently, not objective method has been demonstrated to be reliable for the evaluation of vocal handicap after partial laryngectomy. Such a tool would allow objective assessment of the post-operative voice and its clinical course as well as a comparison of different surgical techniques in terms of voice quality. We used a EVA device to measure simultaneously acoustic and aerodynamic parameters. We included 23 normal subjects and 34 patients who had undergone a Tucker laryngectomy. All subjects were males. At sustained voice production, acoustic measures of vibration stability (jitter, coefficient of variation in the fundamental frequency, shimmer, coefficient of variation in intensity) and air leak from the glottis (buccal air flow over intensity). The quality of voice in operated patients was judged by a jury of listeners who assigned a global score to voice quality. Results were analyzed to verify the correlation between objective measurements and the jury's score, taken as the reference measurement. The pertinence of the objective measurements was demonstrated for the stability of the frequency and the glottal air leak. Multiple regression analysis demonstrated that total variance of the objective measurements accounted for 84.7% of the scores provided by the jury (R2 = 0.847, p < 0.0001). These satisfactory results emphasize the interest of multiparametric analysis including aerodynamic measurements. These preliminary results led to the hypothesis that objective and subjective measurements could be useful in techniques aimed at improving voice quality (temporal organization of vibratory instability, work on intralaryngeal pressures).