Leveraging Point Transformers for Detecting Anatomical Landmarks in Digital Dentistry
This addresses the labor-intensive task of landmark identification for clinicians in orthodontics, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing transformer methods for point clouds.
The paper tackled the problem of automatically detecting anatomical landmarks in digital dentistry, such as cusps and tooth-gingiva boundaries, by leveraging point transformer architectures, and reported promising results from experiments in the 3DTeethLand Grand Challenge at MICCAI 2024.
The increasing availability of intraoral scanning devices has heightened their importance in modern clinical orthodontics. Clinicians utilize advanced Computer-Aided Design techniques to create patient-specific treatment plans that include laboriously identifying crucial landmarks such as cusps, mesial-distal locations, facial axis points, and tooth-gingiva boundaries. Detecting such landmarks automatically presents challenges, including limited dataset sizes, significant anatomical variability among subjects, and the geometric nature of the data. We present our experiments from the 3DTeethLand Grand Challenge at MICCAI 2024. Our method leverages recent advancements in point cloud learning through transformer architectures. We designed a Point Transformer v3 inspired module to capture meaningful geometric and anatomical features, which are processed by a lightweight decoder to predict per-point distances, further processed by graph-based non-minima suppression. We report promising results and discuss insights on learned feature interpretability.