• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
• /
• v.19 no.4
• /
• pp.423-429
• /
• 1998

Human pharynx is unique, acting as a complex interchange between the oral cavity and esophagus, and between the nasal cavity and lungs. It is actively involved in the transport of food and liquid, producing the forces that guide that bolus into the upper esophagus and away from the adjacent larynx and lungs. This study intended to develop a biomechanical model of the human pharynx, utilizing Finite Element Method(FEM). Within each model changes in cross sectional intralumenal area were calculated and compared with the area from the computer-generated FE model. Area matching allowed estimation of intraluminal pressure gradients during swallow. The estimated pharyngeal pressure gradient varies from one region to another. The estimated pharyngeal pressure gradients showed different patterns for upper four levels and lower four levels. The contraction velocity for upper four levels is much higher than lower four levels. The higher contraction velocities and pressure gradients in the upper levels are consistent with the bolus velocities required for efficient swallow.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.3 no.2
• /
• pp.23-28
• /
• 2011

Electromagnetometers (EMA) have been widely used in articulatory studies as their temporal resolution can capture most speech activities and the fleshpoint information allows one to readily quantify and analyze tongue shape. However, the drawback is that the data lacks details of activity in the pharyngeal region. Several studies have attempted to estimate the unknown pharyngeal shape of the tongue, but few studies are based on unimodal data containing both front and back regions of the tongue at the same time. We use Stone's ball bearing method to obtain fleshpoint data as well as tongue shape. We further introduce a novel way of connecting balls and attaching them onto the tongue to ensure accurate tracking. An Artificial Neural Network is applied to build a map between observable flesh-points, unknown tongue shape, and pharyngeal region and is optimized to efficiently address nonlinearity.