Automatic Extraction of Inferior Alveolar Nerve Canal Using Feature-Enhancing Panoramic Volume Rendering

摘要: Dental implant surgery, which involves the surgical insertion of a dental into jawbone as an artificial root, has become one most successful applications computed tomography (CT) in implantology. For it is essential to identify vital anatomic structures such inferior alveolar nerve (IAN), should be avoided during procedure. Due ambiguity its structure, IAN very elusive extract CT images. As result, canal typically identified previous studies. This paper presents novel method automatically extracting canal. Mental and mandibular foramens, are regarded ends mandible, detected using 3-D panoramic volume rendering (VR) texture analysis techniques. In VR, color shading compositing methods proposed emphasize foramens isolate them from other fine structures. Subsequently, path line-tracking algorithm. Finally, extracted by expanding region fast marching with new speed function exploiting anatomical information about radius. experimental results ten clinical datasets, accurately, demonstrating that this approach assists dentists substantially surgery.