Deep Learning for Staging Periodontitis Using Panoramic Radiographs.

Objectives: Utilizing a deep learning approach is an emerging trend to improve the efficiency of periodontitis diagnosis and classification. This study aimed to use an object detection model to automatically annotate the anatomic structure and subsequently classify the stages of radiographic bone loss (RBL).

Materials and methods: In all, 558 panoramic radiographs were cropped to 7359 pieces of individual teeth. The detection performance of the model was assessed using mean average precision (mAP), root mean squared error (RMSE). The classification performance was evaluated using accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score. Additionally, receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves and confusion matrices were presented, and the area under the ROC curve (AUC) was calculated.

Results: The mAP was 0.88 when the difference between the ground truth and prediction was 10 pixels, and 0.99 when the difference was 25 pixels. For all images, the mean RMSE was 7.30 pixels. Overall, the accuracy, precision, recall, F1 score, and micro-average AUC of the prediction were 0.72, 0.76, 0.64, 0.68, and 0.79, respectively.

Conclusions: The current model is reliable in assisting with the detection and staging of radiographic bone levels.