Tongue movements and teat compression during bottle feeding: A pilot study of a quantitative ultrasound approach

Nutritive sucking is a complex process, essential to proper growth and development. The complexity of this oral sensorimotor activity includes movements of the tongue and jaw. Tongue movements during nutritive sucking can only be visualized with instrumented methods such as ultrasound. Until now, studies using ultrasound during nutritive sucking performed measurements on each individual ultrasound image frame, which was quite time-consuming. The aim of this pilot study was to automatically process ultrasound video recordings in healthy infants during bottle feeding to measure teat compression and tongue movements.