Usefulness of Acoustic Studies on the Differential Diagnostics of Organic and Functional Dysphonia

Abstract

Phoniatric and acoustic examinations were carried out in a group of 30 patients with dysphonia, including 15 with organic type and 15 with functional type. A complex phoniatric assessment offered the possibility to differentiate between these two groups of pathological voices. This was achieved also on the basis of acoustic analysis of the voice by extracting characteristics such as: formant frequency, Fo and its range, percentage of noise in the analysed verbal text, mean and maximum values of jitter. The possibility of differential diagnosis of these two different types of dysphonia in acoustic studies was confirmed by clinical examinations. The acoustic studies presented can be regarded as a new approach to a fast and sufficiently precise method in the screening diagnostics of dysphonia conditioned by growth of the vocal fold mass.