An Annotated Multi-Site and Multi-Contrast Magnetic Resonance Imaging Dataset for the study of the Human Tongue Musculature.

This dataset provides the first annotated, openly available MRI-based imaging dataset for investigations of tongue musculature, including multi-contrast and multi-site MRI data from non-disease participants. The present dataset includes 47 participants collated from three studies: BeLong (four participants; T2-weighted images), EATT4MND (19 participants; T2-weighted images), and BMC (24 participants; T1-weighted images). We provide manually corrected segmentations of five key tongue muscles: the superior longitudinal, combined transverse/vertical, genioglossus, and inferior longitudinal muscles. Other phenotypic measures, including age, sex, weight, height, and tongue muscle volume, are also available for use. This dataset will benefit researchers across domains interested in the structure and function of the tongue in health and disease. For instance, researchers can use this data to train new machine learning models for tongue segmentation, which can be leveraged for segmentation and tracking of different tongue muscles engaged in speech formation in health and disease. Altogether, this dataset provides the means to the scientific community for investigation of the intricate tongue musculature and its role in physiological processes and speech production.