Prediction of Speech Impairment in Patients Treated for Oral or Oropharyngeal Cancer Using Automatic Speech Analysis

What is already known on the subject Automatic and acoustic analyses compensate for the biases of perceptual speech assessment in clinical practice. Although they are used to assess speech severity, few studies have examined their contribution to the measurement of communication and speech impairment, which is yet an essential objective of clinical intervention. What this paper adds to the existing knowledge Acoustic and automatic analyses (and in particular the use of automatic speech recognition systems) enable good prediction of communication and speech impairment reported by patients, with a limited number of tools and parameters. This prediction is even improved by adding to the models scores from self-questionnaires measuring functional and psychosocial dimensions that may be impacted by the speech disorder. This study provides reliable new tools for measuring impaired communication. What are the potential or actual clinical implications of this work? Acoustic and automatic tools can be used in routine clinical care to obtain a valid and reliable measure of communication and speech impairment. This prediction leads to a follow-up score to quantify the level of communication and speech impairment at a given time and the evolution of patients from a speech sample.