Clinical Impact of Respiratory-Swallow Training on Refractory Dysphagia in OP HNC Funding

The Swallowing Cross-Systems Collaborative (SCSC) at Northwestern University will serve as the core lab for scoring de-identified Modified Barium Swallow Study (MBSS) and Respiratory-Swallow Phase Training (RS) records. A novel scoring methodology for scoring both respiratory signals and swallowing physiology will be used. Scoring of de-identified data will occur onsite at the SCSC. Respiratory data will be time synchronized with videofluoroscopic imaging data. The SCSC will use cycle detection and threshold algorithms to measure respiratory-swallow phase patterning for each subject during pres-intervention, post-intervention and follow-up. Swallowing physiology will be scored by specially trained SCSC SLPs meeting reliability criteria for a validated scoring system for the quantification of swallowing impairment from the MBSS recording. De-identified data will be stored in REDCap for data export for analysis.