AIRFLOW CHARACTERIZATION COMBINED WITH 3D RECONSTRUCTION OF RABBIT VOCAL CORD BASED ON IN-VIVO PHONATORY EXPERIMENTS

摘要

In this paper, a numerical approach combined with experiments is employed to characterize the airflow through the vocal cord. Rabbits are used to perform in vivo magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) experiments and the MRI scan data are directly imposed for the three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction of a 3D high-fidelity model. The vibration modes are observed via the in vivo high-speed videoendoscopy (HSVM) technique, and the time-dependent glottal height is evaluated dynamically for the validation of the 3D reconstruction model 72 sets of rabbit in vivo high-speed recordings are evaluated to achieve the most common vibration mode. The reconstruction is mainly based on MRI data and the HSVM records are supporting and validate the 3D model. A sharp-interface immersed-boundary-method (IBM)-based compressible flow solver is employed to compute the airflow. The primary purpose of the computational effort is to characterize the influence of the vocal folds that applied to the airflow and the airflow-induced phonation. The vocal fold kinematics and the vibration modes are quantified and the vortex structures are analyzed under the influence of vocal folds. The results have shown significant effects of the vocal fold height on the vortex structure, vorticity and velocity. The reconstructed 3D model from this work helps to bring insight into further understanding of the rabbit phonation mechanism. The results provide potential improvement for diagnosis of human vocal fold dysfunction and phonation disorder.