Deformation analysis of the vocal folds from videostroboscopic image sequences of the larynx.

Videostroboscopy is an examination which yields a permanent record of the moving vocal folds. Thus, it allows the diagnosis of abnormalities which contribute to voice disorders. In this paper, in order to find and quantify the deformation of the vocal folds in videostroboscopic recordings, an active contours- (snakes) based approach is used to delineate the vocal folds in each frame of the videostroboscopic image sequence. After this delineation, a new elastic registration algorithm is used to register the vocal fold contours between adjacent frames of the video sequence. This algorithm is based on the regularization principle and is very effective when large deformations are present. A least-squares approach is used to fit an affine model to the displacement vectors found by elastic registration. The parameters of this model, rotation, translation, and deformation along two principle axes, quantify the deformation and allow the succinct characterization of the videostroboscopic recordings based on the deformations that occurred. Experiments are shown with synthetic and real videostroboscopic data that demonstrate the value of the proposed approach.