A novel technique for dental radiographic image segmentation based on neutrosophic logic

Abstract

Oral diseases are very prevalent worldwide and affect people of all ages. Dentists depend on x-rays to study the characteristics of oral diseases. The segmentation and analysis of dental X-ray images pose various challenges compared to other medical images. This makes dental X-ray imaging more challenging because of poor resolution, which makes the segmentation of different parts of teeth and their abnormalities unreliable. It has been shown that Dental X-ray Image Segmentation (DXIS) is a primary and critical step in obtaining relevant and important details about oral diseases. DXIS plays a crucial role in practical dentistry to help identify various periodontal diseases. The proposed methodology automatically segments the teeth regions and assists in further analysis. It works on both peri-apical and panoramic types of dental radiographic images. Neutrosophic logic is used to select the initial region of interest. The best way to improve the performance and make the system faster is to restrict the computation within the foreground regions. The input dental radiographic image is mapped into the neutrosophic domain using the patch level feature, gradient feature, entropy feature, and local binary pattern. Applying neutrosophic logic helps to localize the initial region of interest. Subsequently, a fuzzy c-means algorithm is applied to segment a more accurate region of interest. The proposed methodology has been evaluated on publicly available data sets, ‘Panoramic Dental X-rays with Segmented Mandibles’ and ‘Digital Dental X-ray Database for Caries Screening,’ with the result that the accuracy of the proposed methodology is as high as 93.20%. This performance level confirms that the proposed segmentation technique highly correlates with the manual system.