Dental Dynamics: A Fast New Tool for Quantifying Tooth and Jaw Biomechanics in 3D Slicer

Abstract

Teeth reveal how organisms interact with their environment. Biologists have long looked at the diverse form and function of teeth to study the evolution of feeding, fighting, and development. The exponential rise in the quantity and accessibility of computed tomography (CT) data has enabled morphologists to study teeth at finer resolutions and larger macroevolutionary scales. Measuring tooth function is no easy task, in fact, much of our mechanical understanding is derived from dental shape. Categorical descriptors of tooth shape such as morphological homodonty and heterodonty, overlook nuances in function by reducing tooth diversity for comparative analysis. The functional homodonty method quantitatively assesses the functional diversity of whole dentitions from tooth shape. This method uses tooth surface area and position to calculate the transmission of stress and estimates a threshold for functionally homodont teeth through bootstrapping and clustering techniques. However, some vertebrates have hundreds or thousands of teeth and measuring the shape and function of every individual tooth can be a painstaking task. Here we present Dental Dynamics, a module for 3D slicer that allows for the fast and precise quantification of dentitions and jaws. The tool automates the calculation of several tooth traits classically used to describe form and function (i.e., aspect ratio, mechanical advantage, force, etc.). To demonstrate the usefulness of our module we used Dental Dynamics to quantify 745 teeth across 20 salamanders that exhibit diverse ecologies. We coupled these data with the functional homodonty method to investigate the hypothesis that arboreal Aneides salamanders have novel tooth functions. Dental Dynamics provides a new and fast way to measure teeth and increases the accessibility of the functional homodonty method. We hope Dental Dynamics will encourage further theoretical and methodological development for quantifying and studying teeth.