Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jan 18, 2026

Author Spotlight: Advancing CBCT and Digital Dental Image Integration with AI-Assisted Digitization
Published on: February 23, 2024
Two step approach for detecting and segmenting the second mesiobuccal canal of maxillary first molars on cone beam
Sally Mansour1, Enas Anter2, Ali Khater Mohamed3
1Oral and Maxillofacial Radiology Department, Cairo university, Cairo, Egypt. sally.mansour@dentistry.cu.edu.eg.
Aim:
The purpose of this study was to assess the accuracy of a customized deep learning model based on CNN and U-Net for detecting and segmenting the second mesiobuccal canal (MB2) of maxillary first molar teeth on cone beam computed tomography (CBCT) scans.
Methodology:
CBCT scans of 37 patients were imported into 3D slicer software to crop and segment the canals of the mesiobuccal (MB) root of the maxillary first molar. The annotated data were divided into two groups: 80% for training and validation and 20% for testing. The data were used to train the AI model in 2 separate steps: a classification model based on a customized CNN and a segmentation model based on U-Net. A confusion matrix and receiver-operating characteristic (ROC) analysis were used in the statistical evaluation of the results of the classification model, whereas the Dice-coefficient (DCE) was used to express the segmentation accuracy.
Results:
F1 score, testing accuracy, recall and precision values were 0.93, 0.87, 1.0 and 0.87 respectively, for the cropped images of MB root of maxillary 1st molar teeth in the testing group. The testing loss was 0.4, and the area under the curve (AUC) value was 0.57. The segmentation accuracy results were satisfactory, where the DCE of training was 0.85 and DCE of testing was 0.79.
Conclusion:
MB2 in the maxillary first molar can be precisely detected and segmented via the developed AI algorithm in CBCT images.
Trial Registration:
Current Controlled Trial Number NCT05340140. April 22, 2022.

