Tooth numbering with polygonal segmentation on periapical radiographs: an artificial intelligence study

Accurately identification and tooth numbering on radiographs is essential for any clinicians. The aim of the present study was to validate the hypothesis that Yolov5, a type of artificial intelligence model, can be trained to detect and number teeth in periapical radiographs.

Six thousand four hundred forty six anonymized periapical radiographs without motion-related artifacts were randomly selected from the database. All periapical radiographs in which all boundaries of any tooth could be distinguished were included in the study. The radiographic images used were randomly divided into three groups: 80% training, 10% validation, and 10% testing. The confusion matrix was used to examine model success.

During the test phase, 2578 labelings were performed on 644 periapical radiographs. The number of true positive was 2434 (94.4%), false positive was 115 (4.4%), and false negative was 29 (1.2%). The recall, precision, and F1 scores were 0.9882, 0.9548, and 0.9712, respectively. Moreover, the model yielded an area under curve (AUC) of 0.603 on the receiver operating characteristic curve (ROC).

This study showed us that YOLOv5 is nearly perfect for numbering teeth on periapical radiography. Although high success rates were achieved as a result of the study, it should not be forgotten that artificial intelligence currently only can be guides dentists for accurate and rapid diagnosis.

It is thought that dentists can accelerate the radiographic examination time and inexperienced dentists can reduce the error rate by using YOLOv5. Additionally, YOLOv5 can also be used in the education of dentistry students.