Segmentation of the IAN Canal in CBCT Volumes

In maxillofacial imagery, recent works have been focused on the detection of the Inferior Alveolar Nerve (IAN), since its position is of great relevance for avoiding severe injuries during surgery operations such as third molar extraction or implant installation.

Our efforts on this research area have been focused on:

• Creating novel tools for analyzing and labeling the alveolar nerve from Cone Beam Computed Tomography (CBCT) 3D volumes;
• Releasing valid datasets for deep learning purposes;
• Designing 3D neural networks for the automatic segmentation of the IAN;

Maxillo Dataset

This project led to the generation and release of the first publicly CBCT (Cone Beam Computed Tomography) 3D dataset with professionally produced 3D annotations. The dataset has been published with two different papers "Improving Segmentation of the Inferior Alveolar Nerve through Deep Label Propagation", M. Cipriano, S. Allegretti, F. Bolelli, F. Pollastri, C. Grana, CVPR - New Orleans, USA and "Deep Segmentation of the Mandibular Canal: a New 3D Annotated Dataset of CBCT Volumes", M. Cipriano, S. Allegretti, F. Bolelli, [...], A. Anesi, C. Grana, IEEE Access and has been downloaded by hundreds of research teams in the last months (dataset webpage). 

ToothFairy Challenge 

An extension of the Maxillo Dataset has been released in 2023 and is current part of the MICCAI2023 Challenge entitled: "ToothFairy: A Cone-Beam Computed Tomography Segmentation Challenge". The challenge, organized by Prof. Federico Bolelli, Luca Lumetti e Prof. Costantino Grana from the AImageLab group, in collaboration with Prof. Bram van Ginneken fromt the Radboud University, Netherlands, is hosted on grand-challenge.

Publications

1	Di Bartolomeo, Mattia; Pellacani, Arrigo; Bolelli, Federico; Cipriano, Marco; Lumetti, Luca; Negrello, Sara; Allegretti, Stefano; Minafra, Paolo; Pollastri, Federico; Nocini, Riccardo; Colletti, Giacomo; Chiarini, Luigi; Grana, Costantino; Anesi, Alexandre "Inferior Alveolar Canal Automatic Detection with Deep Learning CNNs on CBCTs: Development of a Novel Model and Release of Open-Source Dataset and Algorithm" APPLIED SCIENCES, vol. 13, pp. 1 -18 , 2023 | DOI: 10.3390/app13053271 Journal
2	Cipriano, Marco; Allegretti, Stefano; Bolelli, Federico; Pollastri, Federico; Grana, Costantino "Improving Segmentation of the Inferior Alveolar Nerve through Deep Label Propagation" Proceedings of 2022 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), vol. 2022-, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA, pp. 21105 -21114 , Jun 19-24, 2022 | DOI: 10.1109/CVPR52688.2022.02046 Conference
3	Cipriano, Marco; Allegretti, Stefano; Bolelli, Federico; Di Bartolomeo, Mattia; Pollastri, Federico; Pellacani, Arrigo; Minafra, Paolo; Anesi, Alexandre; Grana, Costantino "Deep Segmentation of the Mandibular Canal: a New 3D Annotated Dataset of CBCT Volumes" IEEE ACCESS, vol. 10, pp. 11500 -11510 , 2022 | DOI: 10.1109/ACCESS.2022.3144840 Journal
4	Mercadante, Cristian; Cipriano, Marco; Bolelli, Federico; Pollastri, Federico; Di Bartolomeo, Mattia; Anesi, Alexandre; Grana, Costantino "A Cone Beam Computed Tomography Annotation Tool for Automatic Detection of the Inferior Alveolar Nerve Canal" Proceedings of the 16th International Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications - Volume 4: VISAPP, vol. 4, Vienna, Austria, pp. 724 -731 , Feb 8-10, 2021 | DOI: 10.5220/0010392307240731 Conference