From Mesh Completion to AI Designed Crown

Designing a dental crown is a time-consuming and labor intensive process. Our goal is to simplify crown design and minimize the tediousness of making manual adjustments while still ensuring the highest level of accuracy and consistency. To this end, we present a new end- to-end deep learning approach, coined Dental Mesh Completion (DMC), to generate a crown mesh conditioned on a point cloud context. The dental context includes the tooth prepared to receive a crown and its surroundings, namely the two adjacent teeth and the three closest teeth in the opposing jaw. We formulate crown generation in terms of completing this point cloud context. A feature extractor first converts the input point cloud into a set of feature vectors that represent local regions in the point cloud. The set of feature vectors is then fed into a transformer to predict a new set of feature vectors for the missing region (crown). Subsequently, a point reconstruction head, followed by a multi-layer perceptron, is used to predict a dense set of points with normals. Finally, a differentiable point-to-mesh layer serves to reconstruct the crown surface mesh. We compare our DMC method to a graph-based convolutional neural network which learns to deform a crown mesh from a generic crown shape to the target geometry. Extensive experiments on our dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, which attains an average of 0.062 Chamfer Distance.The code is available at:https://github.com/Golriz-code/DMC.gi

Improving the quality of dental crown using a Transformer-based method

Designing a synthetic crown is a time-consuming, inconsistent, and labor-intensive process. In this work, we present a fully automatic method that not only learns human design dental crowns, but also improves the consistency, functionality, and esthetic of the crowns. Following success in point cloud completion using the transformer-based network, we tackle the problem of the crown generation as a point-cloud completion around a prepared tooth. To this end, we use a geometry-aware transformer to generate dental crowns. Our main contribution is to add a margin line information to the network, as the accuracy of generating a precise margin line directly,determines whether the designed crown and prepared tooth are closely matched to allowappropriateadhesion.Using our ground truth crown, we can extract the margin line as a spline and sample the spline into 1000 points. We feed the obtained margin line along with two neighbor teeth of the prepared tooth and three closest teeth in the opposing jaw. We also add the margin line points to our ground truth crown to increase the resolution at the margin line. Our experimental results show an improvement in the quality of the designed crown when considering the actual context composed of the prepared tooth along with the margin line compared with a crown generated in an empty space as was done by other studies in the literature.

Semi-supervised segmentation of tooth from 3D Scanned Dental Arches

Teeth segmentation is an important topic in dental restorations that is essential for crown generation, diagnosis, and treatment planning. In the dental field, the variability of input data is high and there are no publicly available 3D dental arch datasets. Although there has been improvement in the field provided by recent deep learning architectures on 3D data, there still exists some problems such as properly identifying missing teeth in an arch. We propose to use spectral clustering as a self-supervisory signal to joint-train neural networks for segmentation of 3D arches. Our approach is motivated by the observation that K-means clustering provides cues to capture margin lines related to human perception. The main idea is to automatically generate training data by decomposing unlabeled 3D arches into segments relying solely on geometric information. The network is then trained using a joint loss that combines a supervised loss of annotated input and a self-supervised loss of non-labeled input. Our collected data has a variety of arches including arches with missing teeth. Our experimental results show improvement over the fully supervised state-of-the-art MeshSegNet when using semi-supervised learning. Finally, we contribute code and a dataset.