Title: Hyoid Bone Growth Modeling: Heat Kernel Smoothing on Manifolds
Legend: Left – The hyoid bone, consists of three separate parts, hyoid body and left and right cornua, that ultimately fuse. It plays an important role in supporting the life functions of respiration, mastication and deglutition, and speech/communication. A model is advanced to study the growth of its surface area using 3D hyoid bone models from CT studies. The hyoid bones of typically developing individuals were binned into three age groups: group I (ages 0 and 6), group II (ages 7 and 12) and group III (ages 13 and 19) and the extent of mean displacements between the groups was assessed. Each row shows the F-statistic maps on the hyoid bone reflecting age effect between the groups. The arrows indicate direction of growth and significant growth regions are identified (red) between group II and III, and I and III. The growth is highly localized near the regions where the disconnected parts of the hyoid bone fuse. Right – The hyoid bone, consists of three separate parts, hyoid body and left and right cornua, that ultimately fuse. It plays an important role in supporting the life functions of respiration, mastication and deglutition, and speech/communication.
Citation: Chung MK, Adluru N, Vorperian HK. Heat Kernel Smoothing on Manifolds and Its Application to Hyoid Bone Growth Modeling. In: Statistical Modeling in Biomedical Research: Emerging Topics in Statistics and Biostatistics. Zhao Y, Chen DG, editors. Cham: Springer; 2020. p.235-261.
Abstract: We present a unified heat kernel smoothing framework for modeling 3D anatomical surface data extracted from medical images. Due to image acquisition and preprocessing noises, it is expected the medical imaging data is noisy. The surface data of the anatomical structures is regressed using the weighted linear combination of Laplace-Beltrami (LB) eigenfunctions to smooth out noisy data and perform statistical analysis. The method is applied in characterizing the 3D growth pattern of human hyoid bone between ages 0 and 20 obtained from CT images. We detected a significant age effect on localized parts of the hyoid bone.
About the Lab: The Vocal Tract Development Laboratory (VTLab) uses a combination of imaging, acoustics, and vocal tract modeling to understand the lifespan changes of the vocal tract anatomy in typically and atypically developing individuals, and to examine the relation of anatomic changes to speech acoustics.