Dental arch definition in computed tomographs using two semi-automatic methods

Computed tomography is a widely used image examination in dental imaging that provides an accurate location of oral structures and features, including the dental arch, which is an important anatomical feature. This study proposes two new semi-automatic methods for arch definition in CTs, with minimal user effort. This study includes 25 CT examinations. The first method is based on the teeth pulps, and the second one is based on the whole mandible. The methods use thresholding and morphological operations to obtain the arches. The evaluation process includes two different metrics DTW and IoU. For both metrics, the initial results of M1 were very low, but the average performance of M2 can be considered high. The analysis showed that changing the input improves the M1 results substantially. The promising results presented here suggest that these methods can be used as auxiliary tools for the proposed task. Graphical abstract