Estimating the Severity of Oral Lesions Via Analysis of Cone Beam Computed Tomography Reports: A Proposed Deep Learning Model

Objectives

Several factors such as unavailability of specialists, dental phobia, and financial difficulties may lead to a delay between receiving an oral radiology report and consulting a dentist. The primary aim of this study was to distinguish between high-risk and low-risk oral lesions according to the radiologist's reports of cone beam computed tomography (CBCT) images. Such a facility may be employed by dentist or his/her assistant to make the patient aware of the severity and the grade of the oral lesion and referral for immediate treatment or other follow-up care.

Methods

A total number of 1134 CBCT radiography reports owned by Shiraz University of Medical Sciences were collected. The severity level of each sample was specified by three experts, and an annotation was carried out accordingly. After preprocessing the data, a deep learning model, referred to as CNN-LSTM, was developed, which aims to detect the degree of severity of the problem based on analysis of the radiologist's report. Unlike traditional models which usually use a simple collection of words, the proposed deep model uses words embedded in dense vector representations, which empowers it to effectively capture semantic similarities.

Results

The results indicated that the proposed model outperformed its counterparts in terms of precision, recall, and F1 criteria. This suggests its potential as a reliable tool for early estimation of the severity of oral lesions.

Conclusions

This study shows the effectiveness of deep learning in the analysis of textual reports and accurately distinguishing between high-risk and low-risk lesions. Employing the proposed model which can Provide timely warnings about the need for follow-up and prompt treatment can shield the patient from the risks associated with delays.

Clinical significance

Our collaboratively collected and expert-annotated dataset serves as a valuable resource for exploratory research. The results demonstrate the pivotal role of our deep learning model could play in assessing the severity of oral lesions in dental reports.