Fast and Accurate Semiautomatic Segmentation of Individual Teeth from Dental CT Images

In this paper, we propose a fast and accurate semiautomatic method to effectively distinguish individual teeth from the sockets of teeth in dental CT images. Parameter values of thresholding and shapes of the teeth are propagated to the neighboring slice, based on the separated teeth from reference images. After the propagation of threshold values and shapes of the teeth, the histogram of the current slice was analyzed. The individual teeth are automatically separated and segmented by using seeded region growing. Then, the newly generated separation information is iteratively propagated to the neighboring slice. Our method was validated by ten sets of dental CT scans, and the results were compared with the manually segmented result and conventional methods. The average error of absolute value of volume measurement was 2.29 ± 0.56%, which was more accurate than conventional methods. Boosting up the speed with the multicore processors was shown to be 2.4 times faster than a single core processor. The proposed method identified the individual teeth accurately, demonstrating that it can give dentists substantial assistance during dental surgery.