Physiology Based Tongue Modeling and Simulation

Simulation of the tongue has important applications in biomechanics, linguistics, medical science, and graphics. This paper presents a 3D anatomically and biomechanically accurate tongue model. To ensure anatomical accuracy, the tongue and its muscles are constructed based on accurate medical data. Due to their complexity, muscles geometry and fiber arrangement are specially specified by a proposed interactive muscle marking method. To ensure biomechanical accuracy, a nonlinear, quasi-incompressible, isotropic, hyperelastic constitutive model is applied for describing the tongue tissues, and particularly, tongue muscles are additionally endowed with an anisotropic constitutive model, which reflects the active and passive mechanical behavior of muscle fibers. The dynamic simulation results of tongue movements subjected to certain muscle activations are presented and validated with experimental data, and experiments show that our tongue model can synthesize realistic tongue animation.