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Abstract:
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In orthodontics practice, it has an important meaning to cluster dental arch forms of human adults with normal occlusions into a few sets of patterns according to their geometric similarities. In this work, we propose a method to cluster dental arch forms of normal occlusion samples; each sample consists of 28 points measured on 2-D plane;14 points are for maxilla and the other 14 points are for mandible. Two key components of the proposed method is: First, we define the distance between two arch form as the area between two arches in 2-D plane. Second, we plot the observations on polar coordinates rather than on Cartesian coordinates due to several merits we will see in the presentation. We apply our method to clustering dental casts of 307 normal occlusion samples which are selected from 15,836 adults through a community dental health survey from the year of 1999 to 2002 in Seoul.
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