Automatic Dent-landmark detection in 3-D CBCT dental volumes

Orthodontic craniometric landmarks provide critical information in oral and maxillofacial imaging diagnosis and treatment planning. The Dent-landmark, defined as the odontoid process of the epistropheus, is one of the key landmarks to construct the midsagittal reference plane. In this paper, we propose a learning-based approach to automatically detect the Dent-landmark in the 3D cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT) dental data. Specifically, a detector is learned using the random forest with sampled context features. Furthermore, we use spacial prior to build a constrained search space other than use the full three dimensional space. The proposed method has been evaluated on a dataset containing 73 CBCT dental volumes and yields promising results.