Innovative Approach to Supernumerary Teeth Identification: CNN-Based Intelligent Medical Auxiliary System for Occlusal Radiographs

Supernumerary teeth (ST) not only commonly obstruct adjacent permanent teeth, causing ectopic eruption, rotation, and root absorption but also present the potential for cystic lesions extending into the nasal cavity. Early intervention is crucial to avoid severe complications like periodontal abscesses and severe dental caries. However, ST may occur in any oral region with variable shapes and growth directions, posing a significant challenge for image recognition. This prevalent dental condition in the Asian population (3-5%) lacks sufficient representation in AI-assisted systems. Given this, the study suggests a system reliant on Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for identifying supernumerary teeth in occlusal radiographs. The algorithm incorporates feature enhancement and AI integration methods. Additionally, the study introduces a color mapping approach to address the variability in ST shape and growth direction, significantly improving recognition accuracy from 63.16% to 76.32%. The result of this research demonstrates an improvement of 18.43% in accuracy and 78.95% in recall rate for supernumerary tooth detection compared to existing technology. This study successfully addresses the challenge of identifying supernumerary teeth, which were previously difficult to recognize. To ensure compliance with ethical and regulatory standards, the proposal has obtained certification from the Institutional Review Board (IRB) with the reference number 202400084B0.