ToothMaker: Realistic Panoramic Dental Radiograph Generation via Disentangled Control

Generating high-fidelity dental radiographs is essential for training diagnostic models. Despite the development of numerous methods for other medical data, generative approaches in dental radiology remain unexplored. Due to the intricate tooth structures and specialized terminology, these methods often yield ambiguous tooth regions and incorrect dental concepts when applied to dentistry. In this paper, we take the first attempt to investigate diffusion-based teeth X-ray image generation and propose ToothMaker, a novel framework specifically designed for the dental domain. Firstly, to synthesize X-ray images that possess accurate tooth structures and realistic radiological styles simultaneously, we design control-disentangled fine-tuning (CDFT) strategy. Specifically, we present two separate controllers to handle style and layout control respectively, and introduce a gradient-based decoupling method that optimizes each using their corresponding disentangled gradients. Secondly, to enhance model’s understanding of dental terminology, we propose prior-disentangled guidance module (PDGM), enabling precise synthesis of dental concepts. It utilizes large language model to decompose dental terminology into a series of meta-knowledge elements and performs interactions and refinements through hypergraph neural network. These elements are then fed into the network to guide the generation of dental concepts. Extensive experiments demonstrate the high fidelity and diversity of the images synthesized by our approach. By incorporating the generated data, we achieve substantial performance improvements on downstream segmentation and visual question answering tasks, indicating that our method can greatly reduce the reliance on manually annotated data.