Reconstruction of High-Resolution Tongue

Magnetic resonance images of the tongue have been used in both clinical studies and scientific research to reveal tongue structure. In order to extract different features of the tongue and its relation to the vocal tract, it is beneficial to acquire three orthog- onal image volumes—e.g., axial, sagittal, and coronal volumes. In order to maintain both low noise and high visual detail and mini- mize the blurred effect due to involuntary motion artifacts, each set of images is acquired with an in-plane resolution that is much bet- ter than the through-plane resolution. As a result, any one dataset, by itself, is not ideal for automatic volumetric analyses such as seg- mentation, registration, and atlas building or even for visualization when oblique slices are required. This paper presents a method of superresolution volume reconstruction of the tongue that gener- ates an isotropic image volume using the three orthogonal image volumes. The method uses preprocessing steps that include regis- tration and intensity matching and a data combination approach with the edge-preserving property carried out by Markov random field optimization. The performance of the proposed method was demonstrated on 15 clinical datasets, preserving anatomical de- tails and yielding superior results when compared with different reconstruction methods as visually and quantitatively assessed. Index Terms—Human tongue, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), superresolution volume reconstruction.