Acoustical Aspects of Vocal Function Following Radiotherapy for Early T1a Laryngeal Cancer

We evaluated acoustic voice characteristics of 18 male patients undergoing radiotherapy. The subjects were seen for voice assessment preradiotherapy and at 1 month, 3 months, 6 months, and 1 year following radiotherapy. A multidimensional voice analysis computer program (IVANS, Avaaz Innovations, 1998) was employed to evaluate measures of traditional frequency and amplitude perturbation as well as time-based and linear prediction (LP) modeled "noise" parameters of the acoustic output in conjunction with perceptual judgments of overall vocal quality. The results indicate vocal deterioration of vocal function immediately following radiotherapy with gradual and significant improvement in acoustic and perceptual features over 9 to 12 months following the radiation treatment. Measures of glottal noise demonstrated higher sensitivity than frequency-based measures of voice perturbation, and with more consistent, less variable changes in acoustical voice output from the preradiation to the 12 month postradiation periods. Future research evaluating vowel type and acoustic perturbation measures with a larger sample of subjects over a longer time period seems warranted.