The MicrUs ultrasound speech research system

The MicrUs ultrasound speech research system is designed to provide millisecond level synchronisation of ultrasound images and speech audio using a hardware pulse stream generated by the MicrUs scanner.  

The Speech research system comes with the MicrUs scanner (with hardware sync ports) and one or more probes, an external soundcard (Focustrite Scarlett Solo (2 channel) or 4i4 (4 channel), Pulse Stretch (PStretch) unit to condition the hardware sync signal from the MicrUs scanner and an UltraFit headset to fix the probe in the correct position under the chin.

Micro Research Brochure rev0325

The research system comes with the powerful Articulate Assistant Advanced (AAA) recording and analysis app capable of synchronising recordings of speech audio, ultrasound, lip video and EMA. It provides tools for automatically extracting keypoints from images e.g. tongue contour and lip contour, converting them from pixels to mm. EMA sensor tangential velocity and other standard measures are incorporated. A labelling facility allows repetitions of segments to be identified and measures from those segments to be analysed and compared using a wide variety of analysis options integrated in AAA. Althernatively measures from those segments may be exported to a spreadsheet or statistical package such as R for bespoke analysis. 

AAA is continually updated with new capabilities and features, arising both from Articulate Instruments internal research and work published from other labs. All updates are free after initial purchase. The latest version can be downloaded here with open access demonstration datasets  available to investigate the software capabilities before purchase.

Below is an example of a recording of co-registered ultrasound and EMA. Movies can be generated by AAA for conference presentation.