Dental Disease Detection based on CNN for Panoramic Dental Radiographs

Panoramic dental radiography is one of the examination tools frequently performed in dental clinics and hospitals as it captures a wide range of the dental region and its surroundings, but due to the complex structure of the dental area and lack of time, dentists focus on tiny parts of the images. With the help of Machine Learning, dentists can detect dental defects and anomalies faster and more accurately. In this study, a data set of 733 panoramic radiographs of adult patients was collected from the faculty of Oral and Dental Medicine, Future University, Egypt. Using a combination of pre-trained CNN architecture and a finetuned network, the collected panoramic radiographs were used to determine the optimal architecture. The purpose of this research was to develop a computer-aided detection system based on a finetuned CNN algorithm, and to evaluate the accuracy and usefulness of this system for the detection of proximal and occlusal caries, interdental and inter radicular alveolar bone loss, periapical lesions, and impacted teeth in panoramic radiographs. Different object detection models were tested to detect selected dental diseases that were found in the panoramic radiographs, and after a few experiments, the YOLOv5 architecture was proved to be the most optimal after achieving 0.61 mAP@0.5 and 0.28 mAP@ [0.5-0.95] for the total six classes. This is the best-achieved results to our knowledge.