Department of Diagnostic Radiology and Nuclear Medicine, University of Maryland School of Medicine, Baltimore.
Department of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging, Yale School of Medicine, New Haven, CT.
J Speech Lang Hear Res. 2022 Oct 17;65(10):3661-3673. doi: 10.1044/2022_JSLHR-22-00040. Epub 2022 Sep 2.
The goal of this study is to validate the muscle architecture derived from both ex vivo and in vivo diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (dMRI) of the human tongue with histology of an ex vivo tongue.
dMRI was acquired with a 200-direction high angular resolution diffusion imaging (HARDI) diffusion scheme for both a postmortem head (imaged within 48 hr after death) and a healthy volunteer. After MRI, the postmortem head was fixed and the tongue excised for hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) staining and histology imaging. Structure tensor images were generated from the stained images to better demonstrate muscle fiber orientations. The tongue muscle fiber orientations, estimated from dMRI, were visualized using the tractogram, a novel representation of crossing fiber orientations, and compared against the histology images of the ex vivo tongue.
Muscle fibers identified in the tractograms showed good correspondence with those appearing in the histology images. We further demonstrated tongue muscle architecture in in vivo tractograms for the entire tongue.
The study demonstrates that dMRI can accurately reveal the complex muscle architecture of the human tongue and may potentially benefit planning and evaluation of oral surgery and research on speech and swallowing.
本研究的目的是验证从人类舌部离体和活体扩散加权磁共振成像（dMRI）获得的肌肉结构与离体舌部的组织学结果一致。
对一具死后头颅（在死后 48 小时内进行成像）和一名健康志愿者进行了 200 个方向高角分辨率扩散成像（HARDI）扩散方案的 dMRI 采集。MRI 后，将尸体头部固定并切除舌头，进行苏木精和伊红（H&E）染色和组织学成像。从染色图像生成结构张量图像，以更好地显示肌肉纤维方向。使用示踪图（一种交叉纤维方向的新表示）从 dMRI 估计的舌部肌肉纤维方向，并与离体舌部的组织学图像进行比较。
示踪图中识别出的纤维与组织学图像中出现的纤维具有良好的对应关系。我们进一步展示了整个舌部的活体示踪图中的舌部肌肉结构。
该研究表明，dMRI 可以准确揭示人类舌部的复杂肌肉结构，可能有助于口腔手术的规划和评估以及言语和吞咽研究。
