Authors:
Pedro Gómez
1
;
Jiří Mekyska
2
;
Luboš Brabenec
3
;
Patrik Šimko
3
;
Irena Rektorová
4
;
Andrés Gómez
5
and
Victoria Rodellar
1
Affiliations:
1
NeuSpeLab, CTB, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, 28220 Pozuelo de Alarcón, Madrid, Spain
;
2
Department of Telecommunications, Brno University of Technology, Brno, Czech Republic
;
3
Applied Neuroscience Research Group, Central European Institute of Technology - CEITEC, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic
;
4
First Department of Neurology, Faculty of Medicine and St. Anne’s University Hospital, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic
;
5
Usher Institute, Faculty of Medicine, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, U.K.
Keyword(s):
Parkinson’s Disease, Functional Assessment of Phonation, Neuromotor EEG Activity Monitoring, Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation.
Abstract:
Parkinson’s Disease (PD) is an increasing prevalence neurodegenerative condition affecting the life quality of people suffering from its neuromotor and cognitive performance. PD symptoms include vocalization and speech alterations, known as hypokinetic dysarthria (HD). One of the manifestations of HD is unstable phonation. Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (rTMS) is a non-invasive method that may improve some motor and non-motor symptoms of persons with PD (PwP). The present study concentrates on analyzing and comparing the phonation behavior of two cases before (pre-stimulus) and after (post-stimulus) ten sessions of rTMS treatment, to assess the extent of changes in their vocalization. Voice recordings of a sustained vowel [a:] taken immediately before and after the treatment, and at follow-up sessions (at six, ten, and fourteen weeks after the baseline assessment) were processed by inverse filtering to estimate a biomechanical correlate of vocal fold stiffness, which ba
nd-pass filtered into EEG-related frequency bands. Log-likelihood ratios between pre- and post-stimulus amplitude distributions of each frequency band, Mann-Whitney U-tests, and normalized difference scores showed significant improvements in the actively stimulated case, which were not observed in the sham case. Early preliminary insights into the capability of phonation quality assessment on monitoring neuromechanical activity from acoustic signals are shown.
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