Multimodal Laryngoscopic Video Analysis for Assisted Diagnosis of Vocal Fold Paralysis
This work addresses the need for objective and efficient diagnostic tools in clinical settings for vocal fold disorders, representing an incremental improvement through the integration of audio and video data.
This paper tackles the problem of automating the diagnosis of Vocal Fold Paralysis by developing a multimodal system that analyzes laryngoscopic videos, achieving reliable classification results on a real-world clinic dataset.
This paper presents the Multimodal Laryngoscopic Video Analyzing System (MLVAS), a novel system that leverages both audio and video data to automatically extract key video segments and metrics from raw laryngeal videostroboscopic videos for assisted clinical assessment. The system integrates video-based glottis detection with an audio keyword spotting method to analyze both video and audio data, identifying patient vocalizations and refining video highlights to ensure optimal inspection of vocal fold movements. Beyond key video segment extraction from the raw laryngeal videos, MLVAS is able to generate effective audio and visual features for Vocal Fold Paralysis (VFP) detection. Pre-trained audio encoders are utilized to encode the patient voice to get the audio features. Visual features are generated by measuring the angle deviation of both the left and right vocal folds to the estimated glottal midline on the segmented glottis masks. To get better masks, we introduce a diffusion-based refinement that follows traditional U-Net segmentation to reduce false positives. We conducted several ablation studies to demonstrate the effectiveness of each module and modalities in the proposed MLVAS. The experimental results on a public segmentation dataset show the effectiveness of our proposed segmentation module. In addition, unilateral VFP classification results on a real-world clinic dataset demonstrate MLVAS's ability of providing reliable and objective metrics as well as visualization for assisted clinical diagnosis.