Automatic detection of developmental stages of molar teeth with deep learning

The aim was to fully automate molar teeth developmental staging and to comprehensively analyze a wide range of deep learning models' performances for molar tooth germ detection on panoramic radiographs.

The dataset consisted of 210 panoramic radiographies. The data were obtained from patients aged between 5 and 25 years. The stages of development of molar teeth were divided into 4 classes such as M1, M2, M3 and M4. 9 different convolutional neural network models, which were Cascade R-CNN, YOLOv3, Hybrid Task Cascade(HTC), DetectorRS, SSD, EfficientNet, NAS-FPN, Deformable DETR and Probabilistic Anchor Assignment(PAA), were used for automatic detection of these classes. Performances were evaluated by mAP for detection localization performance and confusion matrices, giving metrics of accuracy, precision, recall and F1-scores for classification part.

Localization performance of the models varied between 0.70 and 0.86 while average accuracy for all classes was between 0.71 and 0.82. The Deformable DETR model provided the best performance with mAP, accuracy, recall and F1-score as 0.86, 0.82, 0.86 and 0.86 respectively.

Molar teeth were automatically detected and categorized by modern artificial intelligence techniques. Findings demonstrated that detection and classification ability of deep learning models were promising for molar teeth development staging. Automated systems have a potential to alleviate the burden and assist dentists.

This is retrospectively registered with the number 2023-1216 by the university ethical committee.