MRI analysis of 3D normal and post-glossectomy tongue motion in speech

Measuring the internal muscular motion and deformation of the tongue during natural human speech is of high interest to head and neck surgeons and speech language pathologists. A pipeline for calculating 3D tongue motion from dynamic cine and tagged Magnetic Resonance (MR) images during speech has been developed. This paper presents the result of a complete analysis of eleven subjects´ (seven normal controls and four glossectomy patients) global tongue motion during speech obtained through MR imaging and processed through the tongue motion analysis pipeline. The data is regularized into the same framework for comparison. A generalized two-step principal component analysis is used to show the major difference between patients´ and controls´ tongue motions. A test is performed to demonstrate the ability of this process to distinguish patient data from control data and to show the potential power of quantitative analysis that the tongue motion pipeline can achieve.