H-FCBFormer Hierarchical Fully Convolutional Branch Transformer for Occlusal Contact Segmentation with Articulating Paper

TL;DR

This paper introduces H-FCBFormer, a novel hierarchical transformer-based model that improves occlusal contact detection accuracy over traditional methods and dentists, using expert-annotated masks for training.

Contribution

The paper presents a new ensemble model combining Vision Transformer and Fully Convolutional Networks with a hierarchical loss for better occlusal contact segmentation.

Findings

Outperforms other machine learning methods in detecting true positive contacts.

Achieves higher accuracy than dentists in identifying occlusal contact areas.

Requires significantly less time for contact identification.

Abstract

Occlusal contacts are the locations at which the occluding surfaces of the maxilla and the mandible posterior teeth meet. Occlusal contact detection is a vital tool for restoring the loss of masticatory function and is a mandatory assessment in the field of dentistry, with particular importance in prosthodontics and restorative dentistry. The most common method for occlusal contact detection is articulating paper. However, this method can indicate significant medically false positive and medically false negative contact areas, leaving the identification of true occlusal indications to clinicians. To address this, we propose a multiclass Vision Transformer and Fully Convolutional Network ensemble semantic segmentation model with a combination hierarchical loss function, which we name as Hierarchical Fully Convolutional Branch Transformer (H-FCBFormer). We also propose a method of generating medically true positive semantic segmentation masks derived from expert annotated articulating paper masks and gold standard masks. The proposed model outperforms other machine learning methods evaluated at detecting medically true positive contacts and performs better than dentists in terms of accurately identifying object-wise occlusal contact areas while taking significantly less time to identify them. Code is available at https://github.com/Banksylel/H-FCBFormer.