Thyroplastic medialisation in unilateral vocal fold paralysis: assessing voice quality recovering

Medialization thyroplasty and endoscopic intracordal infusion of fat or heterologous materials are the treatments of choice for glottic incompetence, of both neurological and cicatricial origin. Functional evaluation after thyroplastic medialisation is often based on several approaches, in order to assess the effectiveness of the adopted technique. The most common analysis methods are: videolaryngostroboscopy (VLS), for morphological aspects evaluation, GRBAS scale and VHI (Voice Handicap Index), relative to perceptive and subjective voice analysis, and MDVP, that provides objective acoustic parameters. First results are presented here, obtained both with these approaches and a new voice analysis tool, based on robust estimators for tracking fundamental frequency F0, noise and formants. New indexes are also proposed, to easily quantify voice quality recovering. The proposed approach was successfully applied to patients that underwent thyroplastic medialisation, and is suited for integrating the MDVP features.