Investigation of the accuracy and sensitivity to change of the acoustic voice quality index in discriminating between perceptual dysphonia severity levels in turkish speaking population

The Acoustic Voice Quality Index (AVQI) is an index that analyzes both sustained vowel phonation and speech samples to examine overall voice quality in a multi-parameter manner and represents voice quality with a value between 0 and 10 based on a weighted combination of six acoustic parameters. The aim of this study is to investigate the diagnostic accuracy of the AVQI in differentiating perceptual dysphonia severity levels and to assess its responsiveness to change in a Turkish-speaking population. In this study, AVQI analysis was performed on voice samples collected from a total of 229 participants, including 66 healthy, 46 mild, 56 moderate, and 61 severe dysphonic participants. In order to examine the Responsiveness to Change, voice samples were collected a second time from 56 participants who showed changes in overall voice quality. In order to determine the severity levels of perceptual dysphonia, an auditory perceptual analysis was performed by five raters. Inter-rater and intra-rater reliability levels were calculated, and excellent reliability was found. Sensitivity, specificity, and cutoff values were calculated between the severity levels of perceptual dysphonia. It was concluded that the AVQI could distinguish between healthy-mild, mild-moderate, and moderate-severe levels of perceptual dysphonia in the Turkish-speaking population with cutoff values of 2.72, 3.76, and 5.08, respectively. Voice recordings before and after changes in overall voice quality were analyzed, and it was concluded that the AVQI is responsiveness to changes in the Turkish speaking population.