A Combination of a 3D Surface Model and CBCT Images for Dental Applications Using VTK Library

In dental applications, information of the soft-and-hard tissues’ surfaces from an intraoral scan or a dental cast helps a user to enhance visualization of anatomical structures in cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT) images. This paper presents a combination process based on the Visualization Toolkit (VTK) library. The proposed process consisted of three main steps: landmark identification, 3D surface registration, and visualization of alignment’s quality. In experiments, the tissue’s surfaces were acquired from intraoral scans and dental casts, and these surfaces were combined with several CBCT data. The results showed that all three parts of the proposed process performed smoothly. A combination of CBCT data and tissue’s surfaces obviously presented good quality of alignment and improved visualization of anatomical structures although qualities of CBCT data were dropped by image noises and some artifacts.