Dental panoramic radiography (DPR) images have recently attracted increasing attention in osteoporosis analysis because of their inner correlation. Many approaches leverage machine learning techniques (e.g., deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs)) to study DPR images of a patient to provide initial analysis of osteoporosis, which demonstrates promising results and significantly reduces financial cost. However, these methods heavily rely on the trabecula landmarks of DPR images that requires a large amount of manual annotations by dentist, and thus are limited in practical application. Addressing this issue, we propose to automatically detect trabecular landmarks in DPR images. In specific, we first apply CNNs-based detector for trabecular landmark detection and analyze its limitations. Using CNNs-based detection as a baseline, we then introduce a statistic shape model (SSM) for trabecular landmark detection by taking advantage of spatial distribution prior of trabecular landmarks in DPR images and their structural relations. In experiment on 108 images, our solution outperforms CNNs-based detector. Moreover, compared to CNN-based detectors, our method avoids the needs of vast training samples, which is more practical in application.
