Nobel Biocare Services, Ag

Medicim Nv

Pieter Van Leemput

Wouter Mollemans

Veerle Wouters

Johannes Keustermans

Bart Goris

Mathias De Somere

An Elen

Dirk Abbeloos

The present invention provides a method for automating the trimming of the boundary region of a three dimensional (3D) open surface mesh model comprising an inner mesh region delineated by boundary vertices and edges. In a particular embodiment, the present invention relates to a method for automating the trimming of an open surface mesh representing an intraoral region.

Automated trimming of a surface mesh

A method is provided for obtaining an estimation of the shape, position and/or orientation of one or more existing teeth of a patient or of one or more teeth to be included in a dental restoration destined to replace one or more missing teeth in a partially edentulous patient. The method involves adapting a virtual teeth setup to the intra-oral anatomical situation of the patient, wherein said virtual teeth setup includes separated surface meshes of individual teeth positioned in a dental arch or segment thereof. The virtual teeth setup is adapted by optimizing an energy function, which represents a quality measure for said virtual teeth setup, and using a statistical model, which describes for a given dentition or segment thereof a probability distribution for at least the shapes of individual teeth, the relations between shapes of neighbouring teeth and/or relations between positions and/or orientations of neighbouring teeth. The adapted virtual teeth setup resulting from said optimized energy function is subsequently used to estimate said sought for shape, position and/or orientation.

Method for estimating at least one of shape, position and orientation of a dental restoration

Methods, systems, and computer programs are disclosed for segmenting, from an image, a tooth's pulp region comprising a pulp chamber and root canals. Curvature-based shape recognition is performed at different spatial scales using smoothed versions of the image. An indication of a point or region is received, located in the pulp chamber and referred to as 'seed'. The seed is used as initial segmentation mask. An update procedure, iteratively carried out, comprises: (i) determining candidate image elements for updating the segmentation mask, comprising: (i&#x2212;1) in the first n iteration(s), a grayscale thresholding taking as reference the current segmentation mask; and, (i&#x2212;2) in at least one iteration, taking the curvature-based shape recognition into account; (ii) retaining, among the candidate image elements, a region of connected candidate image elements that comprises the seed; and (iii) using the retained region to update the segmentation mask.

Methods, systems, and computer programs for segmenting a tooth's pulp region from an image

The present application relates to a computer implemented method of identifying a channel between at least two objects from image data comprising a plurality of pixels or voxels. The method comprises a cycle comprising the steps of choosing a portion of the image data which contains image data of at least a part of at least two of the objects, calculating image gradients of the pixels or voxels of the portion of the image data, and analyzing an orientation of the image gradients. If at least two of the image gradients point into opposing directions, the chosen portion of the image data is determined to contain edges of the objects defining the channel. This method can subsequently be used to separate or segment the objects or parts of the objects defining the channel.

Growing community of inventors

Rumst, Belgium

Pieter Van Leemput