Meyer Co-authors Research in NMR in Biomedicine Advancing Medical Imaging of Vocal Tract
Director of the Janette Ogg Voice Research Center and Associate Professor of Voice (Baritone) and Voice Pedagogy David Meyer, D.M., collaborated with an interdisciplinary team led by Assistant Professor and Director of the University of Iowa Laboratory of Quantitative and Dynamic MRI Sajan Lingala, Ph.D., to publish a peer-reviewed article in NMR in Biomedicine (2023–2024 impact factor 4.478). The article, “Prospectively accelerated dynamic speech MRI at 3 Tesla using a self-navigated spiral based manifold regularized scheme” proposed a novel scheme to improve the imaging of speaking and singing tasks in MRI.
Speech and singing require the intricate coordination of structures inside the body that are hidden from view. MRI is often used to better understand the dynamics of these invisible structures, but this modality has significant limitations. Dynamic scans (showing the movement of the tongue and other articulators) are typically captured in MRI on a single 2D slice, and these scans often suffer from poor spatio-temporal resolution, resulting in blurred images due to motion artifacts.
The scheme proposed in this publication leveraged the imaging capabilities of a custom 16-channel vocal tract coil, the short readout duration and self-navigating capabilities of variable density spirals, and the implicit motion binning capabilities of manifold regularization. It produced single slice imaging of the vocal tract at 17.2 ms/frame and concurrent 3-slice imaging at 52.2ms/frame at a spatial resolution of 2.4 mm2. Compared to competing algorithms, reconstruction quality was improved, and spatial and temporal blurring were reduced. This resulted in enhanced kinematic depictions of speaking tasks, as verified in blinded image quality evaluations by three expert raters.
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