Effects of Deep Learning Architecture and Pretraining on Automated Vocal Fold Segmentation in Ex Vivo High-Speed Phonation Images

Varun Vinayak Kalaiarasan, Charles Farbos de Luzan, Khalid Malik, Ephraim Gutmark, Liran Oren

Two-dimensional (2D) intraglottal particle image velocimetry (PIV) of ex vivo phonation experiments quantifies vocal fold medial surface dynamics and the intraglottal flow field. However, it relies on manual segmentation because residual glare, low tissue-to-flow contrast, and tracer-particle speckle obscure the vocal fold boundaries. This study assessed how deep learning architecture and ImageNet pretraining affect automated vocal fold segmentation in these high-speed images. Four established architectures from three categories were benchmarked: the convolutional neural network (CNN)-based UNet and UNet++, the hybrid CNN-transformer-based TransUNet, and the pure transformer-based Swin-UNet, the latter two trained from scratch and from ImageNet-pretrained weights. Using 16,344 expert-annotated images from 227 phonation trials of excised canine larynges, the six pipelines were trained with five seeds under a standardized protocol and compared on 50 held-out test trials using trial-level Wilcoxon signed-rank tests with Holm correction. Mean Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) spanned only 0.9734 to 0.9764, so the pipelines differed mainly in boundary fidelity. Pretraining…