Verification on the Feasibility of A Vision-Based Swallowing Detection Method

During the irradiation of laryngeal cancer, the motion occur from swallowing can cause the area to be irradiated to detach from the clinical target volume. Therefore, it is necessary to detect the number and time of the patient's swallowing during radiotherapy and take corresponding remedial measures afterward. This paper proposes a non-contact swallowing detection method based on the visual sensor which monitors swallowing by detecting the movement of the thyroid cartilage. In our method, first the video images of the thyroid cartilage are taken by a visual sensor, then an improved template matching algorithm is adopted for signals extraction from video images, finally the number of swallowing and the movement time of swallowing can be obtained by analyzing the signals. To verify the feasibility and accuracy of this method, some experiments are made in ten normal subjects. The results show that this method is feasible for detecting the number and time of swallowing movement.