DE-KAN: A Kolmogorov Arnold Network with Dual Encoder for accurate 2D Teeth Segmentation
This work addresses the problem of precise dental image segmentation for medical professionals, offering incremental improvements over existing methods.
The paper tackled the problem of accurate 2D teeth segmentation from panoramic radiographs, which is challenging due to anatomical variations and overlapping structures, and proposed DE-KAN, a novel dual encoder network that achieved state-of-the-art results with mIoU of 94.5%, Dice coefficient of 97.1%, accuracy of 98.91%, and recall of 97.36%, representing up to +4.7% improvement in Dice compared to existing methods.
Accurate segmentation of individual teeth from panoramic radiographs remains a challenging task due to anatomical variations, irregular tooth shapes, and overlapping structures. These complexities often limit the performance of conventional deep learning models. To address this, we propose DE-KAN, a novel Dual Encoder Kolmogorov Arnold Network, which enhances feature representation and segmentation precision. The framework employs a ResNet-18 encoder for augmented inputs and a customized CNN encoder for original inputs, enabling the complementary extraction of global and local spatial features. These features are fused through KAN-based bottleneck layers, incorporating nonlinear learnable activation functions derived from the Kolmogorov Arnold representation theorem to improve learning capacity and interpretability. Extensive experiments on two benchmark dental X-ray datasets demonstrate that DE-KAN outperforms state-of-the-art segmentation models, achieving mIoU of 94.5%, Dice coefficient of 97.1%, accuracy of 98.91%, and recall of 97.36%, representing up to +4.7% improvement in Dice compared to existing methods.