Automated landmarking for palatal shape analysis using geometric deep learning.

OBJECTIVES: To develop and evaluate a geometric deep-learning network to automatically place seven palatal landmarks on digitized maxillary dental casts. SETTINGS AND SAMPLE POPULATION: The sample comprised individuals with permanent dentition of various ethnicities. The network was trained from manual landmark annotations on 732 dental casts and evaluated on 104 dental casts. MATERIALS AND METHODS: A geometric deep-learning network was developed to hierarchically learn features from point-clouds representing the 3D surface of each cast. These features predict the locations of seven palatal landmarks. RESULTS: Repeat-measurement reliability was <0.3 mm for all landmarks on all casts. Accuracy is promising. The proportion of test subjects with errors less than 2 mm was between 0.93 and 0.68, depending on the landmark. Unusually shaped and large palates generate the highest errors. There was no evidence for a difference in mean palatal shape estimated from manual compared to the automatic landmarking. The automatic landmarking reduces sample variation around the mean and reduces measurements of palatal size. CONCLUSIONS: The automatic landmarking method shows excellent repeatability and promising accuracy, which can streamline patient assessment and research studies. However, landmark indications should be subject to visual quality control.

Exploring palatal and dental shape variation with 3D shape analysis and geometric deep learning.

OBJECTIVES: Palatal shape contains a lot of information that is of clinical interest. Moreover, palatal shape analysis can be used to guide or evaluate orthodontic treatments. A statistical shape model (SSM) is a tool that, by means of dimensionality reduction, aims at compactly modeling the variance of complex shapes for efficient analysis. In this report, we evaluate several competing approaches to constructing SSMs for the human palate. SETTING AND SAMPLE POPULATION: This study used a sample comprising digitized 3D maxillary dental casts from 1,324 individuals. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Principal component analysis (PCA) and autoencoders (AE) are popular approaches to construct SSMs. PCA is a dimension reduction technique that provides a compact description of shapes by uncorrelated variables. AEs are situated in the field of deep learning and provide a non-linear framework for dimension reduction. This work introduces the singular autoencoder (SAE), a hybrid approach that combines the most important properties of PCA and AEs. We assess the performance of the SAE using standard evaluation tools for SSMs, including accuracy, generalization, and specificity. RESULTS: We found that the SAE obtains equivalent results to PCA and AEs for all evaluation metrics. SAE scores were found to be uncorrelated and provided an optimally compact representation of the shapes. CONCLUSION: We conclude that the SAE is a promising tool for 3D palatal shape analysis, which effectively combines the power of PCA with the flexibility of deep learning. This opens future AI driven applications of shape analysis in orthodontics and other related clinical disciplines.

Matching 3D Facial Shape to Demographic Properties by Geometric Metric Learning: A Part-Based Approach.

Face recognition is a widely accepted biometric identifier, as the face contains a lot of information about the identity of a person. The goal of this study is to match the 3D face of an individual to a set of demographic properties (sex, age, BMI, and genomic background) that are extracted from unidentified genetic material. We introduce a triplet loss metric learner that compresses facial shape into a lower dimensional embedding while preserving information about the property of interest. The metric learner is trained for multiple facial segments to allow a global-to-local part-based analysis of the face. To learn directly from 3D mesh data, spiral convolutions are used along with a novel mesh-sampling scheme, which retains uniformly sampled points at different resolutions. The capacity of the model for establishing identity from facial shape against a list of probe demographics is evaluated by enrolling the embeddings for all properties into a support vector machine classifier or regressor and then combining them using a naive Bayes score fuser. Results obtained by a 10-fold cross-validation for biometric verification and identification show that part-based learning significantly improves the systems performance for both encoding with our geometric metric learner or with principal component analysis.

Accurate reconstructions of pelvic defects and discontinuities using statistical shape models.

Treatment of large acetabular defects and discontinuities remains challenging and relies on the accurate restoration of the native anatomy of the patient. This study introduces and validates a statistical shape model for the reconstruction of acetabular discontinuities with severe bone loss through a two-sided Markov Chain Monte Carlo reconstruction method. The performance of the reconstruction algorithm was evaluated using leave-one-out cross-validation in three defect types with varying severity as well as severe defects with discontinuities. The two-sided reconstruction method was compared to a one-sided methodology. Although, reconstruction errors increased with defect size and this increase was most pronounced for pelvic discontinuities, the two-sided reconstruction method was able to reconstruct the native anatomy with higher accuracy than the one-sided reconstruction method. These findings can improve the preoperative planning and custom implant design in patients with large pelvic defects, both with and without discontinuities.

Robust genome-wide ancestry inference for heterogeneous datasets: illustrated using the 1,000 genome project with 3D facial images.

Estimates of individual-level genomic ancestry are routinely used in human genetics, and related fields. The analysis of population structure and genomic ancestry can yield insights in terms of modern and ancient populations, allowing us to address questions regarding admixture, and the numbers and identities of the parental source populations. Unrecognized population structure is also an important confounder to correct for in genome-wide association studies. However, it remains challenging to work with heterogeneous datasets from multiple studies collected by different laboratories with diverse genotyping and imputation protocols. This work presents a new approach and an accompanying open-source toolbox that facilitates a robust integrative analysis for population structure and genomic ancestry estimates for heterogeneous datasets. We show robustness against individual outliers and different protocols for the projection of new samples into a reference ancestry space, and the ability to reveal and adjust for population structure in a simulated case-control admixed population. Given that visually evident and easily recognizable patterns of human facial characteristics co-vary with genomic ancestry, and based on the integration of three different sources of genome data, we generate average 3D faces to illustrate genomic ancestry variations within the 1,000 Genome project and for eight ancient-DNA profiles, respectively.