Comparison of Analysis Techniques for Assessing Oro-Pharyngeal Swallow from Videofluoroscopy

Abstract

MBSImP® is an ordinal rating scale designed to evaluate 17 swallowing events from Videofluoroscopic Swallowing Study. Use of an ordinal scale to judge swallowing impairment involves subjectivity and could affect the reliability of judgements. There is a need to validate the ordinal levels of ratings in MBSImP® with objective data, in order to improve confidence of clinical judgements. The hypothesis was that discrete objective data could be obtained for each level of rating in MBSImP® that are statistically different from the data of the subsequent rating level, which would objectively support the concept of the MBSImP® tool. Two hundred 5ml thin liquids swallows were analyzed and each swallow was rated for MBSImP® Component 9- Anterior Hyoid Excursion. As the corresponding objective measure, the anterior excursion of the hyoid in normalized scalar units was measured for each swallow using ImageJ. Statistical analysis of the data with a one way ANOVA revealed a statistically significant difference (p