# Tooth Instance Segmentation on Panoramic Dental Radiographs Using U-Nets and Morphological Processing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.00095 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00095/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Mar 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Delving Deep into Rectifiers: Surpassing Human-Level Performance on ImageNet Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.01852/) (2015)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [A Survey on Deep Learning in Medical Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05747/) (2017)
- [Automatic segmenting teeth in X-ray images: Trends, a novel data set, benchmarking and future perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.03086/) (2018)
- [Pose-Aware Instance Segmentation Framework from Cone Beam CT Images for Tooth Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.02143/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Flexible visual prompts for in-context learning in computer vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06592/) (2023)
- [A Deep Learning Approach to Teeth Segmentation and Orientation from Panoramic X-rays](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.17176/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Automatic teeth segmentation in panoramic x-ray images is an important research subject of the image analysis in dentistry. In this study, we propose a post-processing stage to obtain a segmentation map in which the objects in the image are separated, and apply this technique to tooth instance segmentation with U-Net network. The post-processing consists of grayscale morphological and filtering operations, which are applied to the sigmoid output of the network before binarization. A dice overlap score of 95.4 - 0.3% is obtained in overall teeth segmentation. The proposed post-processing stages reduce the mean error of tooth count to 6.15%, whereas the error without post-processing is 26.81%. The performances of both segmentation and tooth counting are the highest in the literature, to our knowledge. Moreover, this is achieved by using a relatively small training dataset, which consists of 105 images. Although the aim in this study is to segment tooth instances, the presented method is applicable to similar problems in other domains, such as separating the cell instances