# Using Atlas-driven Imaging for Determining Variations in Velopharyngeal Function Among Children with Cleft Palate and Hypernasal Speech

> **NIH NIH R01** · UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN · 2021 · $690,341

## Abstract

PROJECT SUMMARY
Cleft lip and palate is the most prevalent birth defect in the United States affecting one out of every 577
births. Despite advances in surgery, it is estimated that 25-38% of children with a repaired cleft palate will
continue to have hypernasal speech due to insufficient velopharyngeal closure, requiring additional
surgeries. Although nasal endoscopy is frequently used to determine the type of surgery, it provides only
limited views of the movements of speech. Insufficient information is available from current diagnostic
technologies to visualize the location of muscles and their quantitative functional arrangement in the child.
Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) provides excellent visualization of soft tissue structures, such as
muscles, but has traditionally been too slow to capture speech dynamics where complete contractions may
occur in 100 ms.
The current proposal develops a dynamic MRI imaging method that can image the full vocal tract in
3D+time with high spatial and high temporal resolution, achieving 166 frames per second (FPS) for the
entire volume. Specifically, a dynamic speech imaging technique will be developed that is suitable for
application in children aged 5-8 years old, a critical age range for re-repair of cleft palate in secondary
surgical management. The technique integrates a spatiotemporal atlas that describes the mean motions
across a population of healthy children for particular speech samples. The imaging technique leverages
the atlas to: improve the quality of the reconstructed images, automatically label edges for quantitative
analysis, and focuses the analysis on variances in motion from one subject compared to the healthy atlas.
In order to examine the dependency of the population mean atlas on sex, race, and dialect, spatiotemporal
atlases will be developed at three different geographical sites, with 40 healthy children ages 5-8 years old
at each site, with equal numbers of both sexes and equal numbers of two races. Additionally, we will recruit
45 cleft palate patients ages 5-8 years old following cleft palate repair with and without velopharyngeal
insufficiency with resulting hypernasality. We will apply our imaging technique to examine temporal
characteristics of velopharyngeal muscle function, determining movement differences related to
hypernasality.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10173751
- **Project number:** 5R01DE027989-03
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN
- **Principal Investigator:** Jamie L Perry
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2021
- **Award amount:** $690,341
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2019-07-10 → 2023-06-30

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10173751

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10173751, Using Atlas-driven Imaging for Determining Variations in Velopharyngeal Function Among Children with Cleft Palate and Hypernasal Speech (5R01DE027989-03). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-21 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10173751. Licensed CC0.

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