ISCA Archive Interspeech 2024
ISCA Archive Interspeech 2024

Electroglottography for the assessment of dysphonia in Parkinson's disease and multiple system atrophy

Khalid Daoudi, Solange Milhé de Saint Victor, Alexandra Foubert-Samier, Margherita Fabbri, Anne Pavy-Le Traon, Olivier Rascol, Virginie Woisard, Wassilios G. Meissner

Electroglottography (EGG) is a noninvasive technique which allows accurate measurements of vocal folds dynamics and perturbations during speech. It has been widely used in medical diagnosis and monitoring of several laryngeal pathologies, but its use in neurological disorders has been very limited. This paper presents the first study on EGG in early stages of Parkinson's disease (PD) and an atypical parkinsonian disorder, multiple system atrophy (MSA). Our first objective was to investigate whether EGG can reveal distinctive dysphonia features that could help in the challenging early differential diagnosis between PD and MSA-P, the parkinsonian variant of MSA. The second objective was to verify some hypothesis on early markers of PD drawn from speech-alone acoustic analysis. For MSA-P patients, our analysis revealed a reduced open quotient and confirmed excessive pitch variation. The analysis also mitigated some hypothesis on dysphonia in early stages of PD.