XSD/MPE Special Science Presentation
Speaker: Victoria Cooley Northwestern University, Evanston, IL
Title: “Congenital Defects in Tooth Enamel: Novel Deep Learning Approaches and In Vivo Mouse Models.”
Date: Friday, May 26, 2023
Time: 10:00 am
Location: 431/C010 or Teams
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Meeting ID: 241 289 087 666
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Abstract:
Abstract:
Dental enamel, the most mineralized tissue in the body, protects the tooth and is vital to our overall health and wellbeing. Enamel has evolved remarkable material properties to withstand chewing forces; it is characterized by high hardness and stiffness yet possesses a relatively high toughness. Defects in enamel can compromise its performance and represent a significant cost to society; the U.S. alone spends over $135 billion annually on prevention and treatment. Congenital defects in particular are highly diverse in their etiology and prevalence, although they share a commonality in that they must occur during enamel formation, or amelogenesis. There is thus a need for a better fundamental understanding of amelogenesis to better delineate mechanisms of disease and eventually develop new approaches for intervention and treatment.
In this presentation, we will describe our work in two sections; first, we report on the creation and application of a deep learning tool for rapid, quantitative measurements in synchrotron μCT images of mouse jaws. Specifically, we used semantic segmentation using convolutional neural networks for automatic segmentation of dental tissues followed by an analysis pipeline to output metrics for the whole jaw. μCT is often the first tool used to visualize changes in the mineral in amelogenesis models and is widely available to researchers, so we anticipate that this tool will be broadly useful for the enamel community.