Digital Ultrasound Instrument

数字超声仪

• 批准号: 6731455
• 负责人: Douglas H Whalen
• 金额: $ 15.1万
• 依托单位: HASKINS LABORATORIES, INC.
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 财政年份: 2004
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2004-04-01 至 2005-03-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/6731455
• 关键词: bioimaging /biomedical imaging; biomedical equipment purchase; tongue

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The tongue is one of the most complex motor systems in the human body. Due to the high number of precisely controlled muscles, different portions of the tongue are able to simultaneously pursue different speech tasks. This leads to very complicated patterns of deformation of the body of the tongue. And it is exactly due to this flexibility that the tongue is able to serve as the major tool for distinguishing and contrasting different consonants and vowels, and for being the most important influence on the dynamic acoustic signal emenating from the vocal tract. Unfortunately our understanding of tongue dynamics in normal and disfluent populations is still at its infancy, because it has been very difficult to observe and measure. What is needed is a device that is able to image as much of the tongue as possible, and at a high temporal rate, since significant movement occurs on the scale of tens of milliseconds. But available instruments for tongue measurement either track only a few points of the tongue at high speed (Electromagnetic Midsagittal Articulography and X-ray Microbeam) or image the shape of the tongue, but only statically (MRI) or at a slow pace (analog-output ultrasound and fast MRI). The instrument we seek to purchase, the Aloka SSD-5000 Digital Ultrasound Machine, allows us for the first time to image the shape of the tongue from blade to hyoid bone at 100-200 images per second, which is a high enough rate to capture the complexity of movement even in the fastest plosive consonants. The arrival of this new generation of digital high speed ultrasound machines will allow us to collect and analyze large amounts of data from a variety of normal and disfluent populations, which will provide an empirical basis for deepening our understanding of the kinematics of the tongue and the processes of motor control that drive the kinematics. Furthermore, this instrument will generate speech production data that will further our research on the speech perception process, since the tongue is the primary influence on the dynamic acoustic signal, and the speech perception system seems to acquire most information from the dynamic portions of the speech signal. We plan for the Aloka SSD-5000 machine to be part of a laboratory setup including an Optotrak machine, which will allow us to measure the position of the tongue in Euclidean space. A collection of Matlab applications will allow us to quantify the images collected by the instrument.

描述(由申请人提供)： 舌头是人体最复杂的运动系统之一。由于大量精确控制的肌肉，舌头的不同部分能够同时执行不同的语音任务。这导致舌体的变形模式非常复杂。正是由于这种灵活性，舌头才能成为区分和对比不同辅音和元音的主要工具，并对声道发出的动态声学信号产生最重要的影响。不幸的是，我们对正常和不流利人群舌头动力学的了解还处于初级阶段，因为它一直很难观察和测量。所需要的是一种能够以高时间速率尽可能多地成像舌头的设备，因为显著的运动发生在几十毫秒的尺度上。但现有的舌测量仪器要么只跟踪舌头的几个点，要么高速跟踪舌头的几个点(电磁中矢状动脉造影术和X射线微束)，或者成像舌形，但只能静态地(MRI)或以慢速(模拟输出超声波和快速MRI)。我们寻求购买的仪器，ALOKA SSD-5000数字超声机，使我们第一次能够以每秒100-200幅图像的速度对舌叶到舌骨的形状进行成像，这一速度足够高，即使在最快的塞音辅音中也能捕捉到运动的复杂性。新一代数字高速超声仪的到来将使我们能够收集和分析来自各种正常和不流畅人群的大量数据，这将为深化我们对舌头运动学和驱动运动学的运动控制过程的理解提供经验基础。此外，该仪器将产生语音产生数据，这将有助于我们进一步研究语音感知过程，因为舌头是对动态声信号的主要影响，而语音感知系统似乎从语音信号的动态部分获取大部分信息。我们计划将Aloka SSD-5000机器作为实验室设置的一部分，其中包括一台Optotrak机器，这将使我们能够测量舌头在欧几里得空间中的位置。一组MatLab应用程序将允许我们对仪器收集的图像进行量化。