From Synthetic Data to Real Restorations: Diffusion Model for Patient-specific Dental Crown Completion

Abstract

We present ToothCraft, a diffusion-based model for the contextual generation of tooth crowns, trained on artificially created incomplete teeth. Building upon recent advancements in conditioned diffusion models for 3D shapes, we developed a model capable of an automated tooth crown completion conditioned on local anatomical context. To address the lack of training data for this task, we designed an augmentation pipeline that generates incomplete tooth geometries from a publicly available dataset of complete dental arches (3DS, ODD). By synthesising a diverse set of training examples, our approach enables robust learning across a wide spectrum of tooth defects. Experimental results demonstrate the strong capability of our model to reconstruct complete tooth crowns, achieving an intersection over union (IoU) of 81.8% and a Chamfer Distance (CD) of 0.00034 on synthetically damaged testing restorations. Our experiments demonstrate that the model can be applied directly to real-world cases, effectively filling in incomplete teeth, while generated crowns show minimal intersection with the opposing dentition, thus reducing the risk of occlusal interference. Access to the code, model weights, and dataset information will be available at: https://github.com/ikarus1211/VISAPP_ToothCraft

Figures (6)

• Figure 1: High-level overview of tooth completion process. A unified model is conditioned on the local context, with the optional antagonist condition. The incomplete shapes are synthetically generated. Our model works with every tooth class. The input data are represented as signed distance fields.
• Figure 2: Detailed overview of completion architecture. For the additional antagonist, the Contextual branch is duplicated, and feature vectors are added together. Symbol represents concatenation.
• Figure 3: Augmentation pipeline. Internal representation is denoted above the visualised meshes.
• Figure 4: Visual representations of meshes obtained through the Marching Cubes algorithm on test set.
• Figure 5: Examples of teeth completed by our network. All results were achieved using a single cohesive model, with human-designed restorations crafted in laboratories by technicians.