2021/11/08 by Guangshun Wei, Wei, Guangshun, Zhiming Cui +14 · 2 citations
Computer Science · Dentistry · Engineering · #Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV) #Dental Radiography and Imaging #Dental Research and COVID-19 #Drilling and Well Engineering #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Electrical engineering #Graphics (cs.GR) #Image and Video Processing (eess.IV) #cs.AI #cs.CV #cs.GR #eess.IV #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2111.04212
11pages,27figures
openalex publication_date 2021/11/08 · arxiv created 2021/11/09 · arxiv updated 2021/11/10 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Artificial intelligence (AI) technology is increasingly used for digital orthodontics, but one of the challenges is to automatically and accurately detect tooth landmarks and axes. This is partly because of sophisticated geometric definitions of them, and partly due to large variations among individual tooth and across different types of tooth. As such, we propose a deep learning approach with a labeled dataset by professional dentists to the tooth landmark/axis detection on tooth model that are crucial for orthodontic treatments. Our method can extract not only tooth landmarks in the form of point (e.g. cusps), but also axes that measure the tooth angulation and inclination. The proposed network takes as input a 3D tooth model and predicts various types of the tooth landmarks and axes. Specifically, we encode the landmarks and axes as dense fields defined on the surface of the tooth model. This design choice and a set of added components make the proposed network more suitable for extracting sparse landmarks from a given 3D tooth model. Extensive evaluation of the proposed method was conducted on a set of dental models prepared by experienced dentists. Results show that our method can produce tooth landmarks with high accuracy. Our method was examined and justified via comparison with the state-of-the-art methods as well as the ablation studies.