Tagged-MRI Sequence to Audio Synthesis via Self Residual Attention Guided Heterogeneous Translator

Understanding the underlying relationship between tongue and oropharyngeal muscle deformation seen in tagged-MRI and intelligible speech plays an important role in advancing speech motor control theories and treatment of speech related-disorders. Because of their heterogeneous representations, however, direct mapping between the two modalities-i.e., two-dimensional (mid-sagittal slice) plus time tagged-MRI sequence and its corresponding one-dimensional waveform-is not straightforward. Instead, we resort to two-dimensional spectrograms as an intermediate representation, which contains both pitch and resonance, from which to develop an end-to-end deep learning framework to translate from a sequence of tagged-MRI to its corresponding audio waveform with limited dataset size. Our framework is based on a novel fully convolutional asymmetry translator with guidance of a self residual attention strategy to specifically exploit the moving muscular structures during speech. In addition, we leverage a pairwise correlation of the samples with the same utterances with a latent space representation disentanglement strategy. Furthermore, we incorporate an adversarial training approach with generative adversarial networks to offer improved realism on our generated spectrograms. Our experimental results, carried out with a total of 63 tagged-MRI sequences alongside speech acoustics, showed that our framework enabled the generation of clear audio waveforms from a sequence of tagged-MRI, surpassing competing methods. Thus, our framework provides the great potential to help better understand the relationship between the two modalities.