Convolutional neural network for maxillary sinus segmentation based on the U-Net architecture at different planes in the Chinese population: a semantic segmentation study.

Abstract

Background/purpose: The development of artificial intelligence has revolutionized the field of dentistry. Medical image segmentation is a vital part of AI applications in dentistry. This technique can assist medical practitioners in accurately diagnosing diseases. The detection of the maxillary sinus (MS), such as dental implants, tooth extraction, and endoscopic surgery, is important in the surgical field. The accurate segmentation of MS in radiological images is a prerequisite for diagnosis and treatment planning. This study aims to investigate the feasibility of applying a CNN algorithm based on the U-Net architecture to facilitate MS segmentation of individuals from the Chinese population.

Materials and methods: A total of 300 CBCT images in the axial, coronal, and sagittal planes were used in this study. These images were divided into a training set and a test set at a ratio of 8:2. The marked regions (maxillary sinus) were labelled for training and testing in the original images. The training process was performed for 40 epochs using a learning rate of 0.00001. Computation was performed on an RTX GeForce 3060 GPU. The best model was retained for predicting MS in the test set and calculating the model parameters.

Results: The trained U-Net model achieved yield segmentation accuracy across the three imaging planes. The IoU values were 0.942, 0.937 and 0.916 in the axial, sagittal and coronal planes, respectively, with F1 scores across all planes exceeding 0.95. The accuracies of the U-Net model were 0.997, 0.998, and 0.995 in the axial, sagittal and coronal planes, respectively.

Conclusion: The trained U-Net model achieved highly accurate segmentation of MS across three planes on the basis of 2D CBCT images among the Chinese population. The AI model has shown promising application potential for daily clinical practice.

Clinical trial number: Not applicable.