LMVSegRNN and Poseidon3D: Addressing Challenging Teeth Segmentation Cases in 3D Dental Surface Orthodontic Scans

The segmentation of teeth in 3D dental scans is difficult due to variations in teeth shapes, misalignments, occlusions, or the present dental appliances. Existing methods consistently adhere to geometric representations, omitting the perceptual aspects of the inputs. In addition, current works often lack evaluation on anatomically complex cases due to the unavailability of such datasets. We present a projection-based approach towards accurate teeth segmentation that operates in a detect-and-segment manner locally on each tooth in a multi-view fashion. Information is spatially correlated via recurrent units. We show that a projection-based framework can precisely segment teeth in cases with anatomical anomalies with negligible information loss. It outperforms point-based, edge-based, and Graph Cut-based geometric approaches, achieving an average weighted IoU score of 0.97122±0.038 and a Hausdorff distance at 95 percentile of 0.49012±0.571 mm. We also release Poseidon's Teeth 3D (Poseidon3D), a novel dataset of real orthodontic cases with various dental anomalies like teeth crowding and missing teeth.