Dynamic palatogram generation from Cine MRI for normalized speech assessment

Speech is generated through complex contacts of the tongue with the palate and teeth. Evaluation of the tonguepalate contact can be beneficial in studies of linguistics, diagnosis and treatment of speech disorders, and speech synthesis. In this paper, we propose a method of tongue-palate contact assessment based on cine MR images during speech. We use a 2D U-Net to segment the space between the top of the tongue and the palates on the sagittal slices of the cine images. Then a series of MR palatograms are generated by computing the vertical thickness of the segmented space on all the sagittal slices and projecting onto the axial plane. Compared to static palatography and electropalatography, the proposed method assesses the tongue-palate contact information as well as the tongue-to-palate distances over time. We generate a sequence of MR palatograms for two healthy subjects, from three uttered phrases. During pronunciation of the selected phrases, the tongue-palate contact points and the relative tongue-to-palate distances were similar between the subjects.