Unsupervised tooth segmentation from three dimensional scans of the dental arch using domain adaptation of synthetic data

Background

The automated segmentation of individual teeth from 3D models of the human dental arch is challenging due to variations in tooth alignment, arch form and overall maxillofacial anatomy. Domain adaptation is a specialised technique in deep learning which allows models to adapt to data from different domains, such as varying tooth and dental arch forms, without requiring human annotations.

Purpose

This study aimed to segment individual teeth from various dental arch morphologies in 3D intraoral scans using domain adaptation.

Materials and Methods

Twenty scanned dental arches from various age groups and developmental stages were used to generate 20 simplified synthetic variants of the scans. These synthetic variants, along with 16 natural scanned dental arches, were used to train the deep learning models. Domain adaptation was employed using Gradient Reversal Layer and Siamese Network techniques. The PointNet and PointNet++ model backbones were trained to align the latent space distribution of real and synthetic domains. Validations were performed on four unseen natural scanned arches, with and without domain adaptation enabled, to evaluate whether a 3D deep neural network can be trained without any human-annotated 3D models.

Results

PointNet and PointNet++ models demonstrated a mean intersection-over-union between 0.34 and 0.36 mIoU without domain adaptation enabled and 0.80 and 0.95 mIoU, respectively with domain adaptation enabled when assessing natural scanned dental arches.

Conclusion

Domain adaptation techniques can enable training a segmentation deep learning model using synthetically generated 3D jaw scans without requiring human operators annotating the training data.