Yuan Liang

Yuan Liang, Liang Qiu, Tiancheng Lu et al.

Patient's understanding on forthcoming dental surgeries is required by patient-centered care and helps reduce fear and anxiety. Due to the gap of expertise between patients and dentists, conventional techniques of patient education are usually not effective for explaining surgical steps. In this paper, we present \textit{OralViewer} -- the first interactive application that enables dentist's demonstration of dental surgeries in 3D to promote patients' understanding. \textit{OralViewer} takes a single 2D panoramic dental X-ray to reconstruct patient-specific 3D teeth structures, which are then assembled with registered gum and jaw bone models for complete oral cavity modeling. During the demonstration, \textit{OralViewer} enables dentists to show surgery steps with virtual dental instruments that can animate effects on a 3D model in real-time. A technical evaluation shows our deep learning based model achieves a mean Intersection over Union (IoU) of 0.771 for 3D teeth reconstruction. A patient study with 12 participants shows \textit{OralViewer} can improve patients' understanding of surgeries. An expert study with 3 board-certified dentists further verifies the clinical validity of our system.

Weinan Song, Yuan Liang, Jiawei Yang et al.

Panoramic X-ray (PX) provides a 2D picture of the patient's mouth in a panoramic view to help dentists observe the invisible disease inside the gum. However, it provides limited 2D information compared with cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT), another dental imaging method that generates a 3D picture of the oral cavity but with more radiation dose and a higher price. Consequently, it is of great interest to reconstruct the 3D structure from a 2D X-ray image, which can greatly explore the application of X-ray imaging in dental surgeries. In this paper, we propose a framework, named Oral-3D, to reconstruct the 3D oral cavity from a single PX image and prior information of the dental arch. Specifically, we first train a generative model to learn the cross-dimension transformation from 2D to 3D. Then we restore the shape of the oral cavity with a deformation module with the dental arch curve, which can be obtained simply by taking a photo of the patient's mouth. To be noted, Oral-3D can restore both the density of bony tissues and the curved mandible surface. Experimental results show that Oral-3D can efficiently and effectively reconstruct the 3D oral structure and show critical information in clinical applications, e.g., tooth pulling and dental implants. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to explore this domain transformation problem between these two imaging methods.