Dental caries lesions detection using deformable templates

This paper presents an application of the deformable templates and image processing techniques to locate and analyze the dental caries lesions from the images of X-ray films. Firstly, the polygonal templates were defined to characterize general shapes of human teeth. The templates were then used to find the locations and exact shape and size of each tooth in the film. Once the teeth locations and shapes are known each caries lesion within each tooth can then be located and classified by gray scale analysis. Experimental diagnostic results of the implemented system as compared to the diagnoses of two selected dentists show satisfactory performance of the system