Deep learning systems for detecting and classifying the presence of impacted supernumerary teeth in the maxillary incisor region on panoramic radiographs.

OBJECTIVE

This investigation aimed to verify and compare the performance of 3 deep learning systems for classifying maxillary impacted supernumerary teeth (ISTs) in patients with fully erupted incisors.

STUDY DESIGN

In total, the study included 550 panoramic radiographs obtained from 275 patients with at least 1 IST and 275 patients without ISTs in the maxillary incisor region. Three learning models were created by using AlexNet, VGG-16, and DetectNet. Four hundred images were randomly selected as training data, and 100 images were assigned as validating and testing data. The remaining 50 images were used as new testing data. The sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve were calculated. Detection performance was evaluated by using recall, precision, and F-measure.

RESULTS

DetectNet generally produced the highest values of diagnostic efficacy. VGG-16 yielded significantly lower values compared with DetectNet and AlexNet. Assessment of the detection performance of DetectNet showed that recall, precision, and F-measure for detection in the incisor region were all 1.0, indicating perfect detection.

CONCLUSIONS

DetectNet and AlexNet appear to have potential use in classifying the presence of ISTs in the maxillary incisor region on panoramic radiographs. Additionally, DetectNet would be suitable for automatic detection of this abnormality.