Automated Segmentation of Upper Airways from MRI - Vocal Tract Geometry Extraction

A method for automatically extracting a triangulated surface mesh of the human vocal tract from 3D MRI data is proposed. The algorithm is based on a combination of anatomic landmarking, seeded region growing, and smoothing. More precisely, a mask is automatically created for removing unwanted details not associated with the vocal tract from the MRI voxel data. The mask then is applied to the original MRI data in order to produce an outcome on which marching cubes algorithm for triangulated surface extraction can be used. The proposed method can be used for processing large datasets, e.g., for validation of numerical methods in speech sciences as well as for anatomical studies.