Dental Images' Segmentation Using Threshold Connected Component Analysis

Recent advances in medical imaging analysis, especially the use of deep learning, are helping to identify, detect, classify, and quantify patterns in radiographs. At the center of these advances is the ability to explore hierarchical feature representations learned from data. Deep learning is invaluably becoming the most sought out technique, leading to enhanced performance in analysis of medical applications and systems. Deep learning techniques have achieved great performance results in dental image segmentation. Segmentation of dental radiographs is a crucial step that helps the dentist to diagnose dental caries. The performance of these deep networks is however restrained by various challenging features of dental carious lesions. Segmentation of dental images becomes difficult due to a vast variety in topologies, intricacies of medical structures, and poor image qualities caused by conditions such as low contrast, noise, irregular, and fuzzy edges borders, which result in unsuccessful segmentation. The dental segmentation method used is based on thresholding and connected component analysis. Images are preprocessed using the Gaussian blur filter to remove noise and corrupted pixels. Images are then enhanced using erosion and dilation morphology operations. Finally, segmentation is done through thresholding, and connected components are identified to extract the Region of Interest (ROI) of the teeth. The method was evaluated on an augmented dataset of 11,114 dental images. It was trained with 10 090 training set images and tested on 1024 testing set images. The proposed method gave results of 93% for both precision and recall values, respectively.