Difficulty swallowing, or dysphagia, has become a growing problem. Swallowing complications can lead to
malnutrition, dehydration, respiratory infection, and even death. The current gold standard for analyzing and
diagnosing dysphagia is the videofluoroscopic barium swallow study. In these studies, a fluoroscope is used to
image the patient ingesting barium solutions of different volumes and viscosities. The hyoid bone anchors many
key muscles involved in swallowing and plays a key role in the process. Abnormal hyoid bone motion during
a swallow can indicate swallowing dysfunction. Currently in clinical settings, hyoid bone motion is assessed
qualitatively, which can be subject to intra-rater and inter-rater bias. This paper presents a semi-automatic
method for tracking the hyoid bone that makes quantitative analysis feasible. The user defines a template of the
hyoid on one frame, and this template is tracked across subsequent frames. The matching phase is optimized by
predicting the position of the template based on kinematics. An expert speech pathologist marked the position
of the hyoid on each frame of ten studies to serve as the gold standard. Results from performing Bland-Altman
analysis at a 95% confidence interval showed a bias of 0.0±0.08 pixels in x and -0.08±0.09 pixels in y between
the manually-defined gold standard and the proposed method. The average Pearson's correlation between the
gold standard and the proposed method was 0.987 in x and 0.980 in y. This paper also presents a method
for automatically establishing a patient-centric coordinate system for the interpretation of hyoid motion. This
coordinate system corrects for upper body patient motion during the study and identifies superior-inferior and
anterior-posterior motion components. These tools make the use of quantitative hyoid motion analysis feasible
in clinical and research settings.
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