Automatic Quantification of Speech Intelligibility of Adults with Oral Squamous Cell Carcinoma

OBJECTIVE: It has been the aim of the present study to introduce a novel automatic technique for the objective and quantitative assessment of speech intelligibility to the evaluation of postoperative outcome. PATIENTS AND METHODS: Forty-six patients with oral carcinomas, mean age 59.8 +/- 10.1 years, and an age-matched control group of 40 subjects without oral diseases. Recordings of a standard text read by the patients and the control group were analyzed by an automatic speech recognition system. RESULTS: For the patients, automatic speech recognition yielded word recognition rates between 8 and 82% (mean 49 +/- 19%), for the control group between 60 and 91% (76 +/- 7%). Automatic evaluation closely correlated with the experts' perceptual evaluation of intelligibility (r = -0.93; p < 0.01). The multi-rater kappa of the experts alone (0.55) differed only slightly from the multi-rater kappa of the experts and the speech recognition system (0.58). CONCLUSION: For adults with speech disorders, automatic speech recognition may serve as a valuable tool to assess global speech outcome after treatment of oral squamous cell carcinoma objectively and quantitatively for clinical and research purposes.