A Fast Automatic Reconstruction Method for Panoramic Images Based on Cone Beam Computed Tomography

Abstract

Panoramic images have been widely used in the diagnosis of dental diseases. In the process of panoramic image reconstruction, the position of the dental arch curve usually affects the quality of display content, especially the completion level of the panoramic image. In addition, the metal implants in the patient’s mouth often lead the contrast of the panoramic image to decrease. This paper describes a method to automatically synthesize panoramic images from dental cone beam computed tomography (CBCT) data. The proposed method has two essential features: the first feature is that the method can detect the dental arch curve through axial maximum intensity projection images over different ranges, and the second feature is that our method is able to adjust the intensity distribution of the implant in critical areas, to reduce the impact of the implant on the contrast of the panoramic image. The proposed method was tested on 50 CBCT datasets; the panoramic images generated by this method were compared with images attained from three other commonly used approaches and then subjectively scored by three experienced dentists. In the comprehensive image contrast score, the method in this paper has the highest score of 11.16 ± 2.64 points. The results show that the panoramic images generated by this method have better image contrast.

CBCT-guided 3D Dental Structure Reconstruction from Panoramic X-ray: A Preprocessing Pipeline

“…Zhang et. al [8] employed a similar mechanism but proposed dental arch curve detection based on axial MIP over different ranges. A non-uniform B spline cubic curve fitting with 13 fitting points was used to extract the dental arch curve.…”

Automatic dental arch detection and panoramic imaging from cone beam computed tomography dataset

“…In recent decade, many dental arch detection approaches [4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14] were proposed. These approaches created a 2D mask of jaw bones, and subsequently detected a 2D dental arch from this mask.…”

Dental panoramic imaging by use of CBCT projection data

“…It is therefore highly useful for various elds such as implant planning, abnormal teeth visualization, and jaw evaluation [7][8][9][10]. However, unlike panoramic imaging, dental CBCT diagnosis in a single display would be rather cumbersome in general [16][17][18][19]. Indeed, both dental CBCT and panoramic imaging are often used in clinical sites.…”

“…The most popular method in the software approach is to extract panoramic images from dental CBCT images [16][17][18][19]. Since dental CBCT is of rich patient anatomical information, it is possible to obtain panoramic images by extracting necessary data from CBCT images.…”

“…In addition, unlike the panoramic scan system, there is no out of focus problem because the panoramic image is extracted from the CBCT image along the dental arch. However, the method of synthesizing the panoramic image from the CBCT image is greatly affected by the quality of the CBCT image and the accuracy of the dental arch [16][17][18][19][21][22][23][24][25][26]. Several algorithms have been reported to automatically extract sophisticated dental arches, but the accuracy of the dental arch is degraded when there are missing teeth and/or metal artifacts in the CBCT image [16,22].…”