An Algorithm for Automatically Extracting Dental Arch curve

Abstract

Abstract Dental cone beam CT (CBCT) scans, due to their low radiation dose, are now widely used in the medical diagnosis of patients’ oral cavity. The reconstruction of a panoramic view of the dental arch from the scanned CBCT data facilitates the dentist’s observation of the patient’s oral condition. The most important technique for reconstructing the dental arch panorama is the extraction of the dental arch curve accurately. The existing method is to rely on the experience of the dentist to manually connect the dental arch curve, or use techniques related to threshold segmentation to extract dental arch curve. These methods rely on the experience of dentists on the one hand. On the other hand, when there are interferences such as implants, metal tubes, braces or missing teeth in the patient’s mouth, the threshold calculation will be wrong. Based on this, this article starts with the histogram of CBCT data, and proposes a highly robust and fully automatic dental arch curve extraction method. In the actual experiment, the dental arch curves of 40 different patients were extracted, and all the dental arch curves can be accurately and automatically extracted, thus verifying the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.