Construction of an unbiased spatio-temporal atlas of the tongue during speech

Quantitative characterization and comparison of tongue motion during speech and swallowing present fundamental challenges because of striking variations in tongue structure and motion across subjects. A reliable and objective description of the dynamics tongue motion requires the consistent integration of inter-subject variability to detect the subtle changes in populations. To this end, in this work, we present an approach to constructing an unbiased spatio-temporal atlas of the tongue during speech for the first time, based on cine-MRI from twenty two normal subjects. First, we create a common spatial space using images from the reference time frame, a neutral position, in which the unbiased spatio-temporal atlas can be created. Second, we transport images from all time frames of all subjects into this common space via the single transformation. Third, we construct atlases for each time frame via groupwise diffeomorphic registration, which serves as the initial spatio-temporal atlas. Fourth, we update the spatio-temporal atlas by realigning each time sequence based on the Lipschitz norm on diffeomorphisms between each subject and the initial atlas. We evaluate and compare different configurations such as similarity measures to build the atlas. Our proposed method permits to accurately and objectively explain the main pattern of tongue surface motion.