Annotating the Inferior Alveolar Canal: The Ultimate Tool

The Inferior Alveolar Nerve (IAN) is of main interest in the maxillofacial field, as an accurate localization of such nerve reduces the risks of injury during surgical procedures. Although recent literature has focused on developing novel deep learning techniques to produce accurate segmentation masks of the canal containing the IAN, there are still strong limitations due to the scarce amount of publicly available 3D maxillofacial datasets. In this paper, we present an improved version of a previously released tool, iacat (Inferior Alveolar Canal Annotation Tool), today used by medical experts to produce 3D ground truth annotation. In addition, we release a new dataset, ToothFairy, which is part of the homonymous MICCAI2023 challenge hosted by the Grand-Challenge platform, as an extension of the previously released Maxillo dataset, which was the only publicly available. With ToothFairy, the number of annotations has been increased as well as the quality of existing data.