Fully-automatic synthesizing method of dental panoramic radiograph by using internal curve of mandible in dental volumetric ct

Compared to conventional dental panoramic radiograph, synthesizing panoramic radiograph directly computed from dental cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT) images provides high-resolution images with reduced geometric distortion. Previous approaches required manual operations or were based on CBCT images without metal artifacts or missing teeth. In this paper, we introduced a fully-automatic method that can be applied to CBCT scans under severe conditions, which consist three main steps: bone and teeth segmentation, mandible curve extraction, and panoramic mapping. An adaptive method was first used for bone and teeth segmentation. Then the internal mandible curve, which provides a stable curve regardless of metal artifacts or missing teeth, was extracted and utilized for panoramic mapping. Our synthesizing method showed stable performance on various CBCT data sets.