OralViewer: 3D Demonstration of Dental Surgeries for Patient Education with Oral Cavity Reconstruction from a 2D Panoramic X-ray

Abstract: Patient's understanding on forthcoming dental surgeries is required by patient-centered care and helps reduce fear and anxiety. Due to the gap of expertise between patients and dentists, conventional techniques of patient education are usually not effective for explaining surgical steps. In this paper, we present \textit{OralViewer} -- the first interactive application that enables dentist's demonstration of dental surgeries in 3D to promote patients' understanding. \textit{OralViewer} takes a single 2D panoramic dental X-ray to reconstruct patient-specific 3D teeth structures, which are then assembled with registered gum and jaw bone models for complete oral cavity modeling. During the demonstration, \textit{OralViewer} enables dentists to show surgery steps with virtual dental instruments that can animate effects on a 3D model in real-time. A technical evaluation shows our deep learning based model achieves a mean Intersection over Union (IoU) of 0.771 for 3D teeth reconstruction. A patient study with 12 participants shows \textit{OralViewer} can improve patients' understanding of surgeries. An expert study with 3 board-certified dentists further verifies the clinical validity of our system.