title: CT segmentation of dental shapes by anatomy-driven reformation imaging and B-spline modelling.
abstract: Dedicated imaging methods are among the most important tools of modern computer-aided medical applications. In the last few years, cone beam computed tomography (CBCT) has gained popularity in digital dentistry for 3D imaging of jawbones and teeth. However, the anatomy of a maxillofacial region complicates the assessment of tooth geometry and anatomical location when using standard orthogonal views of the CT data set. In particular, a tooth is defined by a sub-region, which cannot be easily separated from surrounding tissues by only considering pixel grey-intensity values. For this reason, an image enhancement is usually necessary in order to properly segment tooth geometries. In this paper, an anatomy-driven methodology to reconstruct individual 3D tooth anatomies by processing CBCT data is presented. The main concept is to generate a small set of multi-planar reformation images along significant views for each target tooth, driven by the individual anatomical geometry of a specific patient. The reformation images greatly enhance the clearness of the target tooth contours. A set of meaningful 2D tooth contours is extracted and used to automatically model the overall 3D tooth shape through a B-spline representation. The effectiveness of the methodology has been verified by comparing some anatomy-driven reconstructions of anterior and premolar teeth with those obtained by using standard tooth segmentation tools. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
authors.affiliation: Department of Civil and Industrial Engineering, University of Pisa, Largo Lucio Lazzarino, 1, Pisa, 56126, Italy.
authors.forename: S
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Barone
authors.affiliation: Department of Civil and Industrial Engineering, University of Pisa, Largo Lucio Lazzarino, 1, Pisa, 56126, Italy.
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Paoli
authors.affiliation: Department of Civil and Industrial Engineering, University of Pisa, Largo Lucio Lazzarino, 1, Pisa, 56126, Italy.
authors.forename: A V
authors.initials: AV
authors.lastname: Razionale
mesh_terms: D054893:Cone-Beam Computed Tomography; D006801:Humans; D007089:Image Enhancement; D012984:Software; D014070:Tooth / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging*
keywords: 3D imaging; B-spline modelling; cone beam computed tomography; digital dentistry; tooth segmentation