From Synthetic Data to Real Restorations: Diffusion Model for Patient-specific Dental Crown Completion
This addresses the need for patient-specific dental restorations by automating crown generation, though it is incremental as it builds on existing diffusion models for 3D shapes.
The authors tackled the problem of automated tooth crown completion by developing a diffusion-based model trained on synthetic data, achieving an IoU of 81.8% and a Chamfer Distance of 0.00034 on synthetic tests, with applicability to real-world cases.
We present ToothCraft, a diffusion-based model for the contextual generation of tooth crowns, trained on artificially created incomplete teeth. Building upon recent advancements in conditioned diffusion models for 3D shapes, we developed a model capable of an automated tooth crown completion conditioned on local anatomical context. To address the lack of training data for this task, we designed an augmentation pipeline that generates incomplete tooth geometries from a publicly available dataset of complete dental arches (3DS, ODD). By synthesising a diverse set of training examples, our approach enables robust learning across a wide spectrum of tooth defects. Experimental results demonstrate the strong capability of our model to reconstruct complete tooth crowns, achieving an intersection over union (IoU) of 81.8% and a Chamfer Distance (CD) of 0.00034 on synthetically damaged testing restorations. Our experiments demonstrate that the model can be applied directly to real-world cases, effectively filling in incomplete teeth, while generated crowns show minimal intersection with the opposing dentition, thus reducing the risk of occlusal interference. Access to the code, model weights, and dataset information will be available at: https://github.com/ikarus1211/VISAPP_ToothCraft