Automatic Tooth Segmentation of Dental Mesh Based on Harmonic Fields

Abstract

An important preprocess in computer-aided orthodontics is to segment teeth from the dental models accurately, which should involve manual interactions as few as possible. But fully automatic partition of all teeth is not a trivial task, since teeth occur in different shapes and their arrangements vary substantially from one individual to another. The difficulty is exacerbated when severe teeth malocclusion and crowding problems occur, which is a common occurrence in clinical cases. Most published methods in this area either are inaccurate or require lots of manual interactions. Motivated by the state-of-the-art general mesh segmentation methods that adopted the theory of harmonic field to detect partition boundaries, this paper proposes a novel, dental-targeted segmentation framework for dental meshes. With a specially designed weighting scheme and a strategy of a priori knowledge to guide the assignment of harmonic constraints, this method can identify teeth partition boundaries effectively. Extensive experiments and quantitative analysis demonstrate that the proposed method is able to partition high-quality teeth automatically with robustness and efficiency.

3D Intelligent Scissors for Dental Mesh Segmentation

“…In the experiment, the principle of seeds selection is that the wire between two seeds with the furthest distance is as close as possible to the valleys. 6 Computational and Mathematical Methods in Medicine As shown in Figure 7, the qualities of the segmentation boundaries acquired by our and Zhuang's method are similar. However, the number of seeds acquired by our method is less than that of Zhuang's method (shown in Table 3).…”

“…ere are some specific approaches [3][4][5][6][7] that fully exploit the dental characteristics. ese methods are either interaction-intensive or resultinaccurate.…”

“…(2) source Q, Q is a priority queue ordered by dist; (3) while not Q empty do (4) υ Q; (5) υ.final = true; (6) for w adjancen υ and w.final ≠ true do (7) if w.dist > υ.dist + l g (υ, w) then (8) w.dist = υ.dist + l g (υ, w); (9) w.pred = υ; (10) if not w in Q then (11) w Q;…”

A Comparative Analysis on the Dental X-ray Image Segmentation Approaches

“…Concept is also presented with some feature extraction and spatial lustering approaches and presented the results with some cases of segmentation of dental x-ray images. Liao et al (2015) [12] have presented a harmonic field based approach for the autonomous segmentation of dental x-ray mesh model into individual teeth. The considered concept of harmonic field uses the prior knowledge strategy for shape extraction and weighing scheme for the smoothness extraction and overall performs automatic dental teeth segmentation.…”

Interactive Tooth Segmentation Method of Dental Model based on Geodesic

“…The most recent works include semi-automatic [1,8] , automated method [2,3,5] and morphology [6] . The automatic methods cannot reflect the subjective idea of the dentist, and lack adaptability to the complex and varied dental model.…”