Pose estimation of teeth in pathological dental models

Abstract

In this paper, we present a method to estimate the pose of teeth in pathological dental models. Given a 3D pathological model, we aim at computing the orientation and position of each tooth with respect to a healthy dentition. This deviation from a healthy dentition is informative of the orthodontic disorders of the patient. The proposed method is based on the registration of a reference dental model on a patient-specific 3D segmented mesh. Then, dental features, such as the patient's arch forms, are derived. These features, combined with registration information, allow our system to propose a plausible target dental arrangement from which the pose of each tooth is derived.The key contributions of this work are (a) the use of a registered reference model to automatically estimate a plausible target dental arrangement for a given patient, and (b) the derivation of teeth poses from registration information and the target arrangement.