Artificial intelligent-driven decision-making for automating root fracture detection in periapical radiographs

The detection and early diagnosis of root fractures can be challenging; this difficulty applies particularly to newly qualified dentists. Aside from clinical examination, diagnosis often requires radiographic assessment. Nonetheless, human fallibility can introduce errors due to a lack of experience.

The proposed system aimed to assist in detecting root fractures through the integration of artificial intelligence techniques into the diagnosis process as a step for automating dental diagnosis and decision-making processes.

A total of 400 radiographic images of fractured and unfractured teeth were obtained for the present research. Data handling techniques were implemented to balance the distribution of the samples. The AI-based system used the voting technique for five different pretrained models namely, VGG16, VGG19, ResNet50. DenseNet121, and DenseNet169 to perform the analysis. The parameters used for the analysis of the models are loss and accuracy curves.

VGG16 exhibited notable success with low training and validation losses (0.09% and 0.18%, respectively), high specificity, sensitivity, and positive predictive value (PPV). VGG19 showed potential overfitting concerns, while ResNet50 displayed progress in minimizing loss but exhibited bias toward unfractured cases. DenseNet121 effectively addressed overfitting and noise issues, achieving balanced metrics and impressive PPVs for both fractured and unfractured cases (0.933 and 0.898 respectively). With increased depth, DenseNet169 demonstrated enhanced generalization capability.

The proposed AI- based system demonstrated high precision and sensitivity for detecting root fractures in endodontically treated teeth by utilizing the voting method.