Deformable registration of multimodal tongue MR images

High-resolution Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and cine MRI are of great importance to characterize and analyze the tongue structure or motion. High-resolution MRI provides static yet detailed anatomical information whereas cine MRI is well-suited for tongue surface motion analysis during speech. In this work, we present a multimodal image registration method of high-resolution MRI with cine MRI of tongue. Visual and motion analysis of combined anatomical and temporal information can synergistically improve the utility of each modality, thereby allowing for accurate tissue point localization or muscle and structural definition in cine MRI. The accuracy and robustness of the proposed method have been demonstrated by the experiments using clinical datasets that yielded an average error comparable to the inter-observer variability.