Workshop 3

Promising biomarkers for tinnitus and speech/voice in different medical fields
(Lecture Hall F3)

The workshop will consist of two parts of about 45 minutes each. The first part will focus on hearing-related pathology, in particular tinnitus, and the second part will address speech and language disorders/changes in psychiatry.
 

Part 1, 10:15 - 11:00: Tinnitus is an alteration of the auditory system in which neuroplastic changes in auditory and non-auditory areas of the brain lead to the perception of sounds that do not correspond to a real sound source. There is no objective evidence for this condition, nor is there a curative therapy. Objective parameters that could characterize the auditory symptom would be a great help in developing better treatment methods.
This workshop will present two promising methods that are currently in the focus of international research: Genetics (C. Cederroth, 10 min.) and electro-physiology (P. Neff, 10 min.) Subsequently, the potential of these techniques and further options will be discussed in a roundtable (25 min.).

Participants:
Prof. Dr. Christopher R. Cederroth, University Hospital of Tübingen
PD Dr. Patrick Neff, Dept. of Otorhinolaryngology, Head and Neck Surgery, USZ
Prof. Dr. Martin Meyer, Dept. of Comparative Language Science, UZH
Prof. Dr. Tobias Kleinjung, Dept. of Otorhinolaryngology, Head and Neck Surgery, USZ
 

Part 2, 11:00 - 11:45: Speech and voice parameters are increasingly used as biomarkers in a variety of medical contexts with promising results even outside the traditional field of speech and language pathology. An example from psychiatry highlights that lower speech rate and less pitch variability has been shown to be frequent in major depression (Koops et al., 2023) and variability in fundamental frequency and shimmer are related to neurocognitive decline in older adults suggesting relevance in neurology (Santos Revilla et al., in prep). However, there is no consensus across fields and medical disciplines as well as no guidelines on how to record, store, transcribe and analyze speech data, especially in low-resource language varieties such as Swiss German.
The podium discussion (30 min.) will bring together researchers from neuropsychiatry, speech signal processing, aging neuroscience, and speech and language pathology. They will introduce their research areas (each 3 min.) and then discuss the pros and cons of speech and voice as biomarkers in their respective fields including options on how to overcome current challenges.

Participants:
Prof. Volker Dellwo, Dept. of Computational Linguistics, UZH
PD Dr. Meike Brockmann-Bauser, Dept. of Otorhinolaryngology, Head and Neck Surgery, USZ
Roya Hüppi, PhD student TRUSTING Project, Psychiatric University Hospital
Prof. Nathalie Giroud, Dept. of Computational Linguistics, UZH
Prof. Sebastian Olbrich, Psychiatric University Hospital