Observation And Analysis Of The Speech Organs' Movement By Combined Cine-and Tagged-MRI

Magnetic resonance imaging(MRI)techniques have been a promising way in recent speech production studies,and dynamic magnetic imaging with repetitive or real-time MRI scans has been widely used to acquire motions of all the articulators and measure their deformation during speech.While MRI is capable to visualize the entire surfaces of those organs,it lacks landmarks for motion tracking that are available with other techniques such as magnetic sensing methods.One possible solution to have both surface contours and landmarks of the articulators is to combine different imaging techniques.In this paper,we propose a new method to add surface markers on the dynamic MRI of the tongue by combining cine-and tagged-MRI data together.To do so,analysis was done on the images from the two types of scans conducted in the same session.The intersection points of the tag lines with the tongue surface contour were extracted from tagged-MRI data and they were mapped onto cine-MRI data manually.After minimizing the minute mapping errors,the result showed that marker tracking on both oral and pharyngeal surfaces of the tongue was successful.Based on the synthesized datasets,the relationship between the relative tongue size and deformation of the tongue was analyzed.And the result shows that one has a smaller relative tongue size moves its tongue slower.