Mesh based segmentation for automated margin line generation on incisors receiving crown treatment

Dental crowns are essential dental treatments for restoring damaged or missing teeth of patients. Recent design approaches of dental crowns are carried out using commercial dental design software. Once a scan of a preparation is uploaded to the software, a dental technician needs to manually define a precise margin line on the preparation surface, which constitutes a non-repeatable and inconsistent procedure. This work proposes a new framework to determine margin lines automatically and accurately using deep learning. A dataset of incisor teeth was provided by a collaborating dental laboratory to train a deep learning segmentation model. A mesh-based neural network was modified by changing its input channels and used to segment the prepared tooth into two regions such that the margin line is contained within the boundary faces separating the two regions. Next, k-fold cross-validation was used to train 5 models, and a voting classifier technique was used to combine their results to enhance the segmentation. After that, boundary smoothing and optimization using the graph cut method were applied to refine the segmentation results. Then, boundary faces separating the two regions were selected to represent the margin line faces. A spline was approximated to best fit the centers of the boundary faces to predict the margin line. Our results show that an ensemble model combined with maximum probability predicted the highest number of successful test cases (7 out of 13) based on a maximum distance threshold of 200 m (representing human error) between the predicted and ground truth point clouds. It was also demonstrated that the better the quality of the preparation, the smaller the divergence between the predicted and ground truth margin lines (Spearman's rank correlation coefficient of -0.683). We provide the train and test datasets for the community.

Improving the quality of dental crown using a Transformer-based method

Designing a synthetic crown is a time-consuming, inconsistent, and labor-intensive process. In this work, we present a fully automatic method that not only learns human design dental crowns, but also improves the consistency, functionality, and esthetic of the crowns. Following success in point cloud completion using the transformer-based network, we tackle the problem of the crown generation as a point-cloud completion around a prepared tooth. To this end, we use a geometry-aware transformer to generate dental crowns. Our main contribution is to add a margin line information to the network, as the accuracy of generating a precise margin line directly,determines whether the designed crown and prepared tooth are closely matched to allowappropriateadhesion.Using our ground truth crown, we can extract the margin line as a spline and sample the spline into 1000 points. We feed the obtained margin line along with two neighbor teeth of the prepared tooth and three closest teeth in the opposing jaw. We also add the margin line points to our ground truth crown to increase the resolution at the margin line. Our experimental results show an improvement in the quality of the designed crown when considering the actual context composed of the prepared tooth along with the margin line compared with a crown generated in an empty space as was done by other studies in the literature.

Semi-supervised segmentation of tooth from 3D Scanned Dental Arches

Teeth segmentation is an important topic in dental restorations that is essential for crown generation, diagnosis, and treatment planning. In the dental field, the variability of input data is high and there are no publicly available 3D dental arch datasets. Although there has been improvement in the field provided by recent deep learning architectures on 3D data, there still exists some problems such as properly identifying missing teeth in an arch. We propose to use spectral clustering as a self-supervisory signal to joint-train neural networks for segmentation of 3D arches. Our approach is motivated by the observation that K-means clustering provides cues to capture margin lines related to human perception. The main idea is to automatically generate training data by decomposing unlabeled 3D arches into segments relying solely on geometric information. The network is then trained using a joint loss that combines a supervised loss of annotated input and a self-supervised loss of non-labeled input. Our collected data has a variety of arches including arches with missing teeth. Our experimental results show improvement over the fully supervised state-of-the-art MeshSegNet when using semi-supervised learning. Finally, we contribute code and a dataset.