Construction of unbiased dental template and parametric dental model for precision digital dentistry

Lei Ma, Jingyang Zhang, Ke Deng, Peng Xue, Zhiming Cui, Yu Fang, Minhui Tan, Yue Zhao, Min Zhu, Zhongxiang Ding, Dinggang Shen

Abstract: Dental templates and parametric dental models are important tools for various applications in digital dentistry. However, constructing an unbiased dental template and accurate parametric dental models remains a challenging task due to the complex anatomical and morphological dental structures and also the low volume ratio of the teeth. This study aims to develop an unbiased dental template and parametric dental models for precision digital dentistry. In this study, we propose a framework for constructing an unbiased dental template by building an accurate dental atlas from cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT) images with the guidance of teeth segmentation. To address the challenges, we enhance the CBCT images and their segmentation images by employing image cropping, image masking, and segmentation intensity reassigning. We then use the segmentation images to perform co-registration with the CBCT images to generate an accurate dental atlas, from which an unbiased dental template can be generated. By leveraging the unbiased dental template, we develop a framework to construct parametric models of the dentition and every tooth. We used a total of 159 CBCT images of real subjects for experiments. Qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method in constructing an unbiased dental template. We also present the principal components of parametric dentition and tooth models to illustrate the shape variations of the dentition and tooth models. The developed dental template and parametric dental model are available at https://github.com/Marvin0724/Teeth_template.