• The Transactions of the Korea Information Processing Society
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• v.13 no.7
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• pp.326-334
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• 2024

Extra-oral imaging techniques such as Panoramic X-rays (PXs) and Cone Beam Computed Tomography (CBCT) are the most preferred imaging modalities in dental clinics owing to its patient convenience during imaging as well as their ability to visualize entire teeth information. PXs are preferred for routine clinical treatments and CBCTs for complex surgeries and implant treatments. However, PXs are limited by the lack of third dimensional spatial information whereas CBCTs inflict high radiation exposure to patient. When a PX is already available, it is beneficial to reconstruct the 3D oral structure from the PX to avoid further expenses and radiation dose. In this paper, we propose 3DentAI - an U-Net based deep learning framework for 3D reconstruction of oral structure from a PX image. Our framework consists of three module - a reconstruction module based on attention U-Net for estimating depth from a PX image, a realignment module for aligning the predicted flattened volume to the shape of jaw using a predefined focal trough and ray data, and lastly a refinement module based on 3D U-Net for interpolating the missing information to obtain a smooth representation of oral cavity. Synthetic PXs obtained from CBCT by ray tracing and rendering were used to train the networks without the need of paired PX and CBCT datasets. Our method, trained and tested on a diverse datasets of 600 patients, achieved superior performance to GAN-based models even with low computational complexity.