Using a New Deep Learning Method for 3D Cephalometry in Patients With Cleft Lip and Palate

Abstract

Deep learning algorithms based on automatic 3-dimensional (D) cephalometric marking points about people without craniomaxillofacial deformities has achieved good results. However, there has been no previous report about cleft lip and palate. The purpose of this study is to apply a new deep learning method based on a 3D point cloud graph convolutional neural network to predict and locate landmarks in patients with cleft lip and palate based on the relationships between points. The authors used the PointNet++ model to investigate the automatic 3D cephalometric marking points. And the mean distance error of the center coordinate position and the success detection rate (SDR) were used to evaluate the accuracy of systematic labeling. A total of 150 patients were enrolled. The mean distance error for all 27 landmarks was 1.33 mm, and 9 landmarks (30%) showed SDRs at 2 mm over 90%, and 3 landmarks (35%) showed SDRs at 2 mm under 70%. The automatic 3D cephalometric marking points take 16 seconds per dataset. In summary, our training sets were derived from the cleft lip with/without palate computed tomography to achieve accurate results. The 3D cephalometry system based on the graph convolutional neural network algorithm may be suitable for 3D cephalometry system in cleft lip and palate cases. More accurate results may be obtained if the cleft lip and palate training set is expanded in the future.