Localization of Craniomaxillofacial Landmarks on CBCT Images Using 3D Mask R-CNN and Local Dependency Learning

Cephalometric analysis relies on accurate detection of craniomaxillofacial (CMF) landmarks from cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT) images. However, due to the complexity of CMF bony structures, it is difficult to localize landmarks efficiently and accurately. In this paper, we propose a deep learning framework to tackle this challenge by jointly digitalizing 105 CMF landmarks on CBCT images. By explicitly learning the local geometrical relationships between the landmarks, our approach extends Mask R-CNN for end-to-end prediction of landmark locations. Specifically, we first apply a detection network on a down-sampled 3D image to leverage global contextual information to predict the approximate locations of the landmarks. We subsequently leverage local information provided by higher-resolution image patches to refine the landmark locations. On patients with varying non-syndromic jaw deformities, our method achieves an average detection accuracy of 1.38± 0.95mm, outperforming a related state-of-the-art method.