A Nonlinear 3D Geometric Tongue Model

Abstract

This study describes a nonlinear geometric tongue model based on MRI and Cone-beam CT (CBCT) data. Comparing with the conventional geometric tongue model, the proposed tongue model is controlled by several prototype vertices, and the relationship between tongue mesh vertices and prototype vertices are modeled with quadratic functions. The results indicate that: i) quadratic models do improve the reconstruction performance of tongue mesh, especially in the tongue root region; ii) the quadratic model which use the cross-prototype-vertex information achieves the best performance of tongue mesh reconstruction; iii) the reconstruction performance can be further improved if an extra prototype vertex TP in the tongue root region is taken into account, even if TP is estimated from the measured prototype vertices.