This is a
prospective cohort study. A total of 30 consecutive subjects diagnosed with
otosclerosis and presenting to the otology clinic of Dr. George Zaytoun and Dr.
Marc Bassim at the American University of Beirut – Medical Center will be
invited to participate in this study. Dr. Maher Kasty will ask his patients,
who are diagnosed with otosclerosis, at Rafik Hariri Hospital to come to the
otology clinic at AUBMC and participate in the study. While the sample size
might seem small, this study is the first of its kind and is intended to be a
pilot study.
A
total of 20 consecutive subjects diagnosed with otosclerosis will be invited to
participate in this study.
While being examined in the pre-admission unit, patients will be offered enrollment in the study where they will undergo an acoustic voice analysis through the OperaVox® application for mobile operating systems. OperaVOX is a validated iOS application that provides objective analysis of voice quality using acoustic parameters (Mat Baki et al., 2015). It also offers user-friendly interface, and novel acoustic voice analysis algorithms (Hughes et al., 2012). The tested parameters are: Habitual pitch, fundamental frequency, Voice Turbulence Index, Noise-to-Harmonic Ratio, shimmer, jitter and formant frequencies. They will then be offered another acoustic analysis simultaneously with their follow-up postoperative audiogram after 1 month using the same method.
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Subjects above 18 years of age
diagnosed with otosclerosis presenting o the otology clinic at AUBMC
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Subjects with recent history of
upper respiratory tract infection
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Subjects with recent history of
laryngeal manipulation
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Subjects with known laryngeal
pathology
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Subjects with history of chronic
ear infections
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Subjects with previous ear
surgery