An MRI-based 3-D tongue atlas for tongue modeling

• Published in: The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America Vol. 120; no. 5_Supplement; pp. 3353 - 3354
• Main Authors: Wu, Chao-Min, Goh, Han Tiet
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 01.11.2006
• ISSN: 0001-4966; 1520-8524
• DOI: 10.1121/1.4781435

The main objective of this study is to build an MRI-based 3-D tongue atlas with an established available spatial transformation technique. The subjects for the MRI data were eight male and eight female college students (19–28 years old) who are native speakers of mandarin with Taiwanese accent without speech disorders. The oral MR images (axial: TR, 400 ms; TE, 10 ms, FOV 24×24; image matrix, 256×256 for 35 slices with 2-mm thickness) were acquired using a GE SIGNA 1.5-T scanner in the University Hospital of Chung Shan Medical University. The axial MR images of the human tongue were first segmented with snakes active contour method, then the 3-D tongues of each subject were reconstructed with morphology-based gray-level interpolation. Finally, these 3-D tongues were spatial transformed into a 3-D tongue atlas with thin-plate spline method. The 3-D tongue atlases for male and female subjects and morphometric studies, such as subject-to-subject, subject-to-atlas, and male-to-female, of these two atlases will be presented. Implication of these data related to tongue modeling will also be discussed. These information will be used as the basis for future research on tongue modeling and underlying physiological mechanism of normal and disordered speech production.