Acoustic and Sentiment Analyses for Voice and Life Quality Characterisation After Medical Intervention in Voice Pathologies

Standardised questionnaires for dysphonic patients allow clinicians to understand the psychophysiological response to medical intervention. Self-reports, however, cannot encompass all possible aspects of living with a voice disorder; they may not be adequate for certain professionals or pathologies, and they are time-consuming. This study proposes a combined approach of sentiment and acoustic analyses to investigate patients' states of mind and vocal quality, along with their possible interrelationship, before and after clinical treatment. Twenty-six patients completed a free speech task pre- and post-operatively where they were asked to express how they perceive their voice, how dysphonia impacted their job and social life, and expectations and satisfaction about the therapy. Audio recordings were used for acoustic analysis, and a custom pre-trained sentiment classifier was implemented to perform sentiment scoring on preprocessed and tokenised transcriptions. Statistical analysis highlighted a significant increase in sentiment, indicating the beneficial effects of medical intervention on quality of life and significant improvements in vocal quality in male patients, i.e., more stable and less noisy voices. Moreover, female patients presented a significant positive correlation between fundamental frequency and sentiment, underlying that restoring a more feminine voice helped achieve a more positive mood.Clinical Relevance-The proposed tool provides an additional point of view to evaluate more quickly and automatically the psychophysiological impact of medical intervention. Moreover, it is also independent of gender, voice pathology, and treatment type, fostering its potential widespread use and applicability.