Toward automatic vocal tract area function estimation from accelerated three-dimensional magnetic resonance imaging
Yoon‐Chul Kim, Jangwon Kim, Michael Proctor, Asterios Toutios, Krishna S. Nayak, Sungbok Lee, Shrikanth Shri Narayanan · 2013
Vocal tract area function estimation from three-dimensional (3D) volumetric dataset often involves complex and manual procedures such as oblique slice cutting and image segmentation. We introduce a semi-automatic method for estimating vocal tract area function from 3D Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) datasets. The method was implemented on a custom MATLAB graphical user interface and computes the area function in a user-interactive way. The 3D MRI datasets were acquired with 1.25 mm isotropic resolution during 8-seconds sustained sound productions of vowels /IY/, /AA/, /UW / by one male native speaker of American English at a 3 Tesla MRI scanner. Index Terms: speech production, magnetic resonance imaging, image segmentation, area function, vocal tract shape.