ABSTRACT
Speech production involves a complex spatiotemporal coordination of several articulators including the lips, tongue, velum, epiglottis, and the glottis. Current modalities to study speech production include electromagnetic articulography (EMA), ultrasound, X-ray videofluoroscopy, and real time magnetic resonance imaging. In this talk I shall be speaking on MRI and its utility to assess speech in real time. MRI has unique advantages over other modalities (eg. non-invasiveness, flexibility in imaging arbitrary planes, visualizing deep structures, etc). However the slow image formation process has historically limited the achievable spatiotemporal resolutions, and slice coverage. In this talk, I will introduce novel sparse sampling and model based constrained reconstruction, and off-resonance reduction methods that my lab has developed which has dramatically improved the speed of real time MRI. This framework has enabled vocal tract imaging at upto 90 frames/sec, and 3D full vocal tract imaging of sustained sounds at short scan times of 7 sec. These tools providing a unique window to non-invasively assess various speech patterns. I will also describe efforts in other upper-airway applications including assessing breathing, swallowing. I will wind up with future directions.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Sajan Goud Lingala, PhD is an Assistant Professor of the Roy J Carver Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Iowa. Prior to joining U.Iowa, he was a senior research scientist at Siemens Healthineers. He was a post-doctoral research associate at the Magnetic Resonance Engineering Laboratory (MREL), University of Southern California (USC), Los Angeles. He completed his PhD in Biomedical Engineering in Dec 2013 at the Iowa Institute of Biomedical Imaging (IIBI), University of Iowa. His research interests are in the design of advanced acquisition and reconstruction methods for rapid and informative magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) exams. He has contributed to 20 articles in various high impact technical and clinical journals, over 60 peer-reviewed conference publications, one patent, and one book-chapter. He is also a recipient of several accolades including the Junior fellow distinction from the International Society of Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (ISMRM), Rex Montgomery best dissertation prize (Univ of Iowa), USC provost's post-doc grant, American Heart Association pre-doctoral fellowship, best graduate student award (Iowa Institute of Biomedical Imaging, Univ. of Iowa), summa and magna cum laude awards for several abstracts presented at the annual meetings of ISMRM.
