We introduce a biomechanical model of oropharyngeal structures that adds the soft-palate, pharynx, and larynx to our previous models of jaw, skull, hyoid, tongue, and face in a unified model. The model includes a comprehensive description of the upper airway musculature, using point-to-point muscles that may either be embedded within the deformable structures or operate externally. The airway i...

Deformable models are used extensively in image processing, computer vision, and medical imaging applications, particularly to delineate object boundaries. Problems associated with initialization and poor convergence to boundary concavities, however, have limited their utility. This chapter presents an external force for deformable models, largely solving both problems. This external force, whi...

Modeling the peripheral speech motor system can advance the understanding of speech motor control and audiovisual speech perception. A 3-D physical model of the human face is presented. The model represents the soft tissue biomechanics with a multilayer deformable mesh. The mesh is controlled by a set of modeled facial muscles which uses a standard Hill-type representation of muscle dynamics. I...

Contact mechanics plays an important role in the design, performance analysis, simulation, and control of legged robots. The Hunt–Crossley model and the Coulomb friction model are often used as black-box models with limited consideration of the properties of the terrain and the feet. This paper analyzes the foot–terrain interaction based on the knowledge of terramechanics and reveals the relati...

In this paper, we propose solutions to real time simulation and interaction of deformable objects in virtual reality. Firstly, we present LEM Long Element Method, a method created for physically based simulation of deformable objects. LEM has been conceived specially for objects filled with fluids. Using Pascal’s Principle and volume conservation, the method produces a static solution for globa...

We present a system that reconstructs the 3D motion of the left ventricle (LV) for a full cardiac cycle using a deformable model built from tagged MR images. Two sets of cues are drawn from tagged MRI. The intersections of the three tagging planes, and the intersections of the LV boundary and the tagging planes, are interpolated onto the mesh vertices. We implement a deformable model to track t...

This paper presents a new deformable model using both population-based and patient-specific shape statistics to segment lung fields from serial chest radiographs. First, a modified scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) local descriptor is used to characterize the image features in the vicinity of each pixel, so that the deformable model deforms in a way that seeks for the region with similar...

In computer vision, two complementary approaches have been widely used to perform object reconstruction and registration. The deformable model framework locally applies internal and external forces to fit 3D data. The non-rigid registration framework iteratively computes the best global transformation that minimizes the distance between a template and the data. In this paper, first we show that...