Multimodal registration of dental and facial images

Abstract

Different medical imaging modalities produce complementary diagnostic information. The integration and registration of the different image types will provide information that is useful to the clinician for diagnosis and treatment planning. Image data that are of interest to the dentofacial clinicians (e.g. orthodontists and oral surgeon) include cephalograms, dental casts, and facial images. This paper presents a dentofacial registration system for registering the 3D images of the dental cast and face of the same patient. It proposes a facial profile-based method to map the 2D cephalogram onto the 3D facial model. Subsequently, a landmark-based approach is applied to register the 3D image of dental casts with the cephalogram. Finally, the dental cast data and facial shape model are integrated and visualized. Experimental results demonstrate the performance of such a dentofacial registration system and show its potential for orthopedic simulation.