The Dental Arch Surface Extracting Algorithm In Teeth Plant Operation

The computer assisted surgery systems could display the virtual model of medical image for the surgeon, and provide them more direct and detailed information from the virtual model by using special medical image processing method. The surgeons could not only observe the patients'status in the real world, but also know the additional information from the virtual model which can not be observed. For example, in teeth plant operation, the teeth usually have different direction and angle, the structure and density of the mandible also vary much. The feature of the teeth could be provided accurately by the computer assisted surgery systems to the surgeon, which makes the operations running successfully.In this paper we introduce a novel concept: a dental arch surface, which is generated in 3D space, and we also propose an efficient algorithm for extracting the surface. At first, different medical image segmentation algorithms are discussed, for the segmentation of the teeth data. Then morphological operations are employed to pre-process the teeth data, and the cavity regions of teeth are automatically extracted. Thereafter different centerline extracting algorithms are discussed and compared, and we propose a novel centerline extracting algorithm base on distance mapping. Finally, the dental arch surface can be generated on the extracted centerlines, as our ultimate goal. The main works are as described as follows:1. Different 3D medical image segmentation algorithms are discussed and compared. The medical image segmentation algorithm could be classified into two categories: model based method and region based method. After discussing and comparing different methods, we finally choose...