Author Spotlight: Advancing CBCT and Digital Dental Image Integration with AI-Assisted Digitization

Our research is focused on integration of CBCT and digital dental images, which is inevitable in creating a virtual head. So far, those three images are marginally using the best film method, which is surface-based. This research is to introduce a new integration method based on AI-assisted digitization and to evaluate its accuracy.

Artificial intelligence has been used to predict treatment outcomes and digitize landmarks in supplementary radiographs or CPCT images. There are some commercial softwares available. This program adopts AI-assisted machine-learned automation in digitizing landmarks in CPCT and also calibrating manually picked landmarks in dental images.

The internal observer, the lab team, showed significant and almost full effect ICC in each method. The main difference showed no significant between the first and second registrations in each ABR and SBR and between both methods. However, the ranges were lower with ABR than with the SBR method.

The ABR protocol not only improved the accuracy, but also significantly reduced the merging time. While the SBR method took three to four minutes, the ABR program only required about 50 seconds for landmark selection, 40 seconds for DDI landmarks, and two to three seconds for CPCT and DDI merging.