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Perceptual evaluation is a means of assessing speech disorder severity in clinical practice. Although limited in reliability and reproducibility, its ease of application makes it very widely used. Choice of assessment criteria and type of speech sample are key points. To compare a panel's perceptual evaluations on two tasks with different criteria. The corpus comprised 87 samples from patients treated for oral cavity or oropharynx cancer, assessed by 6 experts on two criteria (impairment of intelligibility and of speech signal) and two kinds of speech sample (semi-spontaneous versus reading speech) Although strong correlations were found between tasks (r > 0.8), the speech signal criterion gave a score distribution providing a better metric. Severity was greater in oral cavity (mean, 5.44 ± 2.47) than oropharyngeal cancer (6.46 ± 2.24). Semi-spontaneous speech tended to show less severity score ceiling effect than reading speech (mean, 6.06/10 for picture description and 6.51/10 for reading). Speech signal impairment in semi-spontaneous speech seems to be the best clinical measure to assess speech disorder following treatment of oral cavity or oropharynx cancer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The setup of synthetic biological systems involving millions of bases is still limited by the required high quality of synthetic DNA. Important drivers to further open up the field are the accuracy and scale of chemical DNA synthesis and the downstream processing of longer DNA assembled from short fragments. We developed a new, highly parallel and miniaturized method for the preparation of high quality DNA termed “Megacloning” by using Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) technology in a preparative way. We demonstrate our method by processing both conventional and microarray-derived DNA oligonucleotides in combination with a bead-based high throughput pyrosequencing platform, gaining a 500-fold error reduction for microarray oligonucleotides in a first embodiment. We also show the assembly of synthetic genes as part of the Megacloning process. In principle, up to millions of DNA fragments can be sequenced, characterized and sorted in a single Megacloner run, enabling many new applications.