Exploring the relationship between real-time midsagittal images of the vocal tract and volumetric data

Abstract

3D analysis of the vocal tract using dynamic MRI remains a technically difficult challenge. Various approaches have been explored such as using parametic models of the vocal tract (Yehia et al., 1997); integrating data across parallel slices of 2D dynamic data (Zhu et al., 2012); applying stack-of-spiral MRI sampling with 3D constrained reconstruction (Zhao et al., 2020); and combining static 3D and dynamic 2D data (Douros et al., 2019). In this work, we follow a similar approach to Douros et al. and explore the relationship between 2D real-time midsagittal images and 3D volumetric scans of the vocal tract. The real-time MRI midsagittal images are recorded during vowel-consonant-vowel vocal tasks, while the 3D volumetric scans are recorded during sustained vowels. We use large deformation diffeomorphic metric mapping as the foundation for this modeling work. We explore techniques to use constraints provided by the real-time MRI midsagittal images to enable smooth deformations of the 3D volumetric data. We focus on the feasibility of the methods and report on the types of constraints explored and the resulting deformations of the 3D volumetric data.