Michiel van den Brekel

University of Amsterdam | UVA · Department of Oncology-Related Communication Disorders

The aims of this exploratory study and clinical phase II trial were to assess the specific nature and extent of dysphagia in laryngectomized patients with self-reported dysphagia, and its rehabilitation potential using the novel Swallowing Exercise Aid (SEA 2.0). Twenty laryngectomized patients participated in a six-week exercise program with the S...

Objective: This study aims to assess the product performance of a new moldable peristomal adhesive with corresponding heating pad designed to facilitate and improve automatic speaking valve (ASV) fixation for hands-free speech in laryngectomized patients. Methods: Twenty laryngectomized patients, all regular adhesive users with prior ASV experie...

In this paper, we introduce a new corpus of oral cancer speech and present our study on the automatic recognition and analysis of oral cancer speech. A two-hour English oral cancer speech dataset is collected from YouTube. Formulated as a low-resource oral cancer ASR task, we investigate three acoustic modelling approaches that previously have work...

We present an articulatory synthesis framework for the synthesis and manipulation of oral cancer speech for clinical decision making and alleviation of patient stress. Objective and subjective evaluations demonstrate that the framework has acceptable naturalness and is worth further investigation. A subsequent subjective vowel and consonant identif...

Intraoperative tumor identification (extension/margins/metastases) via receptor-specific targeting is one of the ultimate promises of fluorescence-guided surgery. The translation of fluorescent tracers that enable tumor visualization forms a critical component in the realization of this approach. Ex vivo assessment of surgical specimens after topic...

Background: Sentinel lymph node (SN) biopsy (SLNB) has proven to be a valuable tool for staging melanoma patients. Since its introduction in the early 1990s, this procedure has undergone several technological refinements, including the introduction of single photon emission computed tomography combined with computed tomography (SPECT/CT) as well as...

Oral cancer speech is a disease which impacts more than half a million people worldwide every year. Analysis of oral cancer speech has so far focused on read speech. In this paper, we 1) present and 2) analyse a three-hour long spontaneous oral cancer speech dataset collected from YouTube. 3) We set baselines for an oral cancer speech detection tas...

In this paper, automatic assessment models are developed for two perceptual variables: speech intelligibility (SI) and voice quality (VQ). The models are developed and tested on a corpus of Dutch tracheoesophageal (TE) speakers. In this corpus, each speaker read a text passage of approximately 300 syllables and two speech therapists provided consen...

Purpose To develop automatic assessment models for assessing the articulation, phonation and accent of speakers with head and neck cancear (Experiment 1) and to investigate whether the models can track changes over time (Experiment 2). Method Several speech analysis methods for extracting a compact acoustic feature set that characterizes a speaker...

Purpose T1–2N0 (stage I–II) oropharyngeal carcinoma is treated by a single treatment modality, radiotherapy or surgery. Currently, minimally invasive surgery, such as transoral robotic surgery (TORS), is gaining popularity. The purpose of this study was to assess whether stage I–II oropharyngeal cancer can be safely and effectively resected with TO...