Automated segmentation of dental restorations using deep learning: exploring data augmentation techniques

Deep learning has revolutionized image analysis for dentistry. Automated segmentation of dental radiographs is of great importance towards digital dentistry. The performance of deep learning models heavily relies on the quality and diversity of the training data. Data augmentation is a widely used technique implemented in machine learning and deep learning to artificially increase the size and diversity of a training dataset by applying various transformations to the original data.

This work aims to automatically segment implants, prostheses, and fillings in panoramic images using 9 different deep learning segmentation models. Later, it explores the effect of data augmentation methods on segmentation performance of the models. Eight different data augmentation techniques are examined. Performance is evaluated by well-accepted metrics such as intersection over union (IoU) and Dice coefficient.

While averaging the segmentation results for the three classes, IoU varies between 0.62 and 0.82 while Dice score is between 0.75 and 0.9 among deep learning models used. Augmentation techniques provided performance improvements of up to 3.37%, 5.75% and 8.75% for implant, prosthesis and filling classes, respectively.

Findings reveal that choosing optimal augmentation strategies depends on both model architecture and dental structure type.