Lingual ultrasound imaging is essential in linguistic research and speech recognition. It has been used widely in different applications as visual feedback to enhance language learning for non-native speakers, study speech-related disorders and remediation, articulation research and analysis, swallowing study, tongue 3D modelling, and silent speech interface. This article provides a comparative analysis and review based on quantitative and qualitative criteria of the two main streams of tongue contour segmentation from ultrasound images. The first stream utilizes traditional computer vision and image processing algorithms for tongue segmentation. The second stream uses machine and deep learning algorithms for tongue segmentation. The results show that tongue tracking using machine learning-based techniques is superior to traditional techniques, considering the performance and algorithm generalization ability. Meanwhile, traditional techniques are helpful for implementing interactive image segmentation to extract valuable features during training and postprocessing. We recommend using a hybrid approach to combine machine learning and traditional techniques to implement a real-time tongue segmentation tool.

The vision transformer (ViT) is a state-of-the-art architecture for image recognition tasks that plays an important role in digital health applications. Medical images account for 90% of the data in digital medicine applications. This article discusses the core foundations of the ViT architecture and its digital health applications. These applications include image segmentation, classification, detection, prediction, reconstruction, synthesis, and telehealth such as report generation and security. This article also presents a roadmap for implementing the ViT in digital health systems and discusses its limitations and challenges.

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