Dental information along curved slices

Within the family of ruled surfaces, the developable curved slices have a special property: they may be flattened without deformation. In this paper we introduce a technique to visualize information encoded in a 3D tomographic volume along such a curved slice. This property is deemed useful in clinical diagnosis, especially for inspection purposes, and mainly because allows for flat measurements which correspond precisely to the 3D measurement along the surface. The paper focuses on human maxillofacial tomographic data and the curved slices run along the full jaw or a number of dental pieces.