# TFormer: 3D Tooth Segmentation in Mesh Scans with Geometry Guided Transformer

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.16627 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.16627/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 42 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Oct 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [Dynamic Graph CNN for Learning on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07829/) (2018)
- [Point Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00931/) (2020)
- [KPConv: Flexible and Deformable Convolution for Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08889/) (2019)
- [PointCNN: Convolution On X-Transformed Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07791/) (2018)
- [PCT: Point cloud transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09688/) (2020)
- [Transformer in Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00112/) (2021)
- [PoinTr: Diverse Point Cloud Completion with Geometry-Aware Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08839/) (2021)
- [Stratified Transformer for 3D Point Cloud Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14508/) (2022)
- [Point Convolutional Neural Networks by Extension Operators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10091/) (2018)
- [Modeling Point Clouds with Self-Attention and Gumbel Subset Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03375/) (2019)
- [PVT: Point-Voxel Transformer for Point Cloud Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06076/) (2021)
- [TSGCNet: Discriminative Geometric Feature Learning with Two-Stream GraphConvolutional Network for 3D Dental Model Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.13697/) (2020)
- [PyramNet: Point Cloud Pyramid Attention Network and Graph Embedding Module for Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03299/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [From Full and Partial Intraoral Scans to Crown Proposal: A Classification-Guided Restoration Assistance Pipeline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.15241/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Optical Intra-oral Scanners (IOS) are widely used in digital dentistry, providing 3-Dimensional (3D) and high-resolution geometrical information of dental crowns and the gingiva. Accurate 3D tooth segmentation, which aims to precisely delineate the tooth and gingiva instances in IOS, plays a critical role in a variety of dental applications. However, segmentation performance of previous methods are error-prone in complicated tooth-tooth or tooth-gingiva boundaries, and usually exhibit unsatisfactory results across various patients, yet the clinically applicability is not verified with large-scale dataset. In this paper, we propose a novel method based on 3D transformer architectures that is evaluated with large-scale and high-resolution 3D IOS datasets. Our method, termed TFormer, captures both local and global dependencies among different teeth to distinguish various types of teeth with divergent anatomical structures and confusing boundaries. Moreover, we design a geometry guided loss based on a novel point curvature to exploit boundary geometric features, which helps refine the boundary predictions for more accurate and smooth segmentation. We further employ a multi-task learning scheme, where an additional teeth-gingiva segmentation head is introduced to improve the performance. Extensive experimental results in a large-scale dataset with 16,000 IOS, the largest IOS dataset to our best knowledge, demonstrate that our TFormer can surpass existing state-of-the-art baselines with a large margin, with its utility in real-world scenarios verified by a clinical applicability test.