Non-rigid contour-to-pixel registration of photographic and quantitative light-induced fluorescence imaging of decalcified teeth

摘要

Quantitative light-induced fluorescence (QLF) is widely used to asses the damage of a tooth due to decalcification. In digital photographs, decalcification appears as white spot lesions, i.e. white spots on the tooth surface. We propose a novel multimodal registration approach for the matching of digital photographs and QLF images of decalcified teeth. The registration is based on the idea of contour-to-pixel matching. Here, the curve, which represents the shape of the tooth, is extracted from the QLF image using a contour segmentation by binarization and morphological processing. This curve is aligned to the photo with a non-rigid variational registration approach. Thus, the registration problem is formulated as minimization problem with an objective function that consists of a data term and a regularizer for the deformation. To construct the data term, the photo is pointwise classified into tooth and non-tooth regions. Then, the signed distance function of the tooth region allows to measure the mismatch between curve and photo. As regularizer a higher order, linear elastic prior is used. The resulting minimization problem is solved numerically using bilinear Finite Elements for the spatial discretization and the Gauss-Newton algorithm. The evaluation is based on 150 image pairs, where an average of 5 teeth have been captured from 32 subjects. All registrations have been confirmed correctly by a dental expert. The contour-to-pixel methods can directly be used in 3D for surface-to-voxel tasks.