Rapid semi-automatic segmentation of real-time magnetic resonance images for parametric vocal tract analysis

Vocal tract shaping of emotional speech

“…The distance function refers to the collection of the Euclidean distances between inner and outer tissue-airway boundaries in the oropharyngeal vocal tract as a function of the distance from the lips. The distance function has been popularly used as a set of initial parameters for vocal tract shaping in the literature (Öhman, 1967;Story, 2009;Proctor et al, 2010). The vocal tract length refers to a curvilinear line equidistant from the inner and outer tissue-airway boundaries in the oropharyngeal vocal tract.…”

“…A tool for the automatic tissue segmentation in real-time MR images has been developed for the purposes of this study. Kim et al (2014a) presented an earlier version of the implemented method which shows more accurate segmentation performance across oropharyngeal airway compared to previous work (Proctor et al, 2010). This method performs image enhancement first in a retrospective manner as follows: Local pixel intensity map was computed from reconstructed MR image sequences first, then the value of the map was used to normalize pixel intensity of MR images.…”