Aaron Niebergall1, Shuo Zhang1, Martin Uecker, 12, Jens Frahm1
1Biomedizinische NMR Forschungs GmbH am Max-Planck-Institut fuer biophysikalische Chemie, Goettingen, Germany; 2Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of California, Berkeley, CA, United States
Previous dynamic studies of speaking mechanism using MRI suffer mainly from susceptibility artifacts and insufficient temporal resolution. Here, we applied the recently introduced real-time MRI technique based on radial FLASH acquisition and nonlinear inverse reconstruction. Typical images had an in-plane resolution of 1.5 mm and acquisition times of 33 ms (30 fps), and are free from susceptibility or motion artifacts. The movies successfully resolved the rapid and coordinated movements of the main articulators such as the lips, tongue, velum and vocal folds, during production of vowels, consonants, words and sentences. It thus promises a useful tool to study speech production.