An automatic early stage alveolar-bone-resorption evaluation method on digital dental panoramic radiographs

Min Zhang, Akitoshi Katsumata, Chisako Muramatsu, Takeshi Hara, Hiroki Suzuki, Hiroshi Fujita, Stephen Aylward, Lubomir M. Hadjiiski
2014 Medical Imaging 2014: Computer-Aided Diagnosis  
Periodontal disease is a kind of typical dental diseases, which affects many adults. The presence of alveolar bone resorption, which can be observed from dental panoramic radiographs, is one of the most important signs of the progression of periodontal disease. Automatically evaluating alveolar-bone resorption is of important clinic meaning in dental radiology. The purpose of this study was to propose a novel system for automated alveolar-bone-resorption evaluation from digital dental panoramic
more » ... radiographs for the first time. The proposed system enables visualization and quantitative evaluation of alveolar bone resorption degree surrounding the teeth. It has the following procedures: (1) pre-processing for a test image; (2) detection of tooth root apices with Gabor filter and curve fitting for the root apex line; (3) detection of features related with alveolar bone by using image phase congruency map and template matching and curving fitting for the alveolar line; (4) detection of occlusion line with selected Gabor filter; (5) finally, evaluation of the quantitative alveolar-bone-resorption degree in the area surrounding teeth by simply computing the average ratio of the height of the alveolar bone and the height of the teeth. The proposed scheme was applied to 30 patient cases of digital panoramic radiographs, with alveolar bone resorption of different stages. Our initial trial on these test cases indicates that the quantitative evaluation results are correlated with the alveolar-boneresorption degree, although the performance still needs further improvement. Therefore it has potential clinical practicability.
doi:10.1117/12.2044348 dblp:conf/micad/ZhangKMHS014 fatcat:jmpgh5umzzftxihwcu45ltr33i