Abstract:
Accurate tooth identification and delineation in dental CBCT images are essential in clinical oral diagnosis and treatment. Teeth are positioned in the alveolar bone in a...Show MoreMetadata
Abstract:
Accurate tooth identification and delineation in dental CBCT images are essential in clinical oral diagnosis and treatment. Teeth are positioned in the alveolar bone in a particular order, featuring similar appearances across adjacent and bilaterally symmetric teeth. However, existing tooth segmentation methods ignored such specific anatomical topology, which hampers the segmentation accuracy. Here we propose a semantic graph-based method to explicitly model the spatial associations between different anatomical targets (i.e., teeth) for their precise delineation in a coarse-to-fine fashion. First, to efficiently control the bilaterally symmetric confusion in segmentation, we employ a lightweight network to roughly separate teeth as four quadrants. Then, designing a semantic graph attention mechanism to explicitly model the anatomical topology of the teeth in each quadrant, based on which voxel-wise discriminative feature embeddings are learned for the accurate delineation of teeth boundaries. Extensive experiments on a clinical dental CBCT dataset demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed method compared with other state-of-the-art approaches.
Published in: IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging ( Volume: 41, Issue: 11, November 2022)