Minimally interactive MRI segmentation for subject-specific modelling of the tongue

Abstract

Subject-Specific biomechanical modelling of the human tongue is beneficial for investigating the inter-subject variability in the physiology of the speech, chewing and swallowing. Delineation of the tongue tissue from MRI is essential for modelling, but still remains a challenge due to the lack of definitive boundary features. In this paper, we propose a minimally interactive inter-subject mesh-to-image registration scheme to tackle 3Dsegmentation of the tongue fromMR volumes. An exemplar expert-delineated template is deformed to match the target volume, constrained based on a shape matching regularization technique.We enable effective minimal user interaction by incorporating additional boundary labels in areas where automatic segmentation is deemed inadequate. We validate our method on 12 normal-subjects. Results indicate an average dice overlap of 0.904 with the ground truth, achieved within 3min of the expert interaction.