Biomechanical Modeling of the Human Tongue
Maxime Calka, Pascal Perrier, Michel Rochette, Yohan Payan · 2024
This chapter presents some notions on the anatomy of the tongue and the vocal tract, which are necessary to understand the model structure. It describes the model's implementation in three steps: geometry and structure of the FE mesh, constitutive laws of passive soft tissues and lingual muscle structures, and mechanical and temporal parameterization of the numerical simulations. The chapter presents and analyzes the results from the simulation of the impact of different muscles activations on the shape of the tongue particularly in relation to data published in the literature. The question of computational times for a biomechanical model is important in numerical simulation, which can make the incorporation of such models into clinical application frameworks prohibitive. Eventually, a software tool integrating a reduced model of the biomechanical tongue model should emerge in order to synthesize real time sequences of tongue movement in cases of natural and pathological speech.