Can an ultrasound tongue be overlaid on an MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) vocal tract?
Jim Lee, Maureen Stone · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2010
Ultrasound image sequences and cine-MRI time-frames provide intersecting but not identical data about the articulation of speech. It would be valuable to be able to combine ultrasound and MRI datasets in a way that maximizes their strengths. Midsagittal MRI images the entire vocal tract; ultrasound images the tongue surface. However, MRI is not portable, requires multiple repetitions, and supine subject positioning. Thus insertion of the tongue from ultrasound movies onto the MRI vocal tract would provide tongue motion in a head coordinate system. This study aligns supine ultrasound tongue contours with MRI tongue contours of the same tasks using (1) rigid alignment of the tongue contours frame-by-frame and (2) rigid alignment of palates, whose alignment parameters are then applied to tongue contours. rms differences compare the error between methods. The value of this study is that if palatal alignment yields a comparable error to tongue alignment, then palatal alignment could be used to insert an ultrasound data set into a vocal tract outline that has no tongue motion data associated with it. [Funding support: R01CA133015.]