Classification of mandibular molar furcation involvement in periapical radiographs by deep learning.

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to classify mandibular molar furcation involvement (FI) in periapical radiographs using a deep learning algorithm.

Materials and methods: Full mouth series taken at East Carolina University School of Dental Medicine from 2011-2023 were screened. Diagnostic-quality mandibular premolar and molar periapical radiographs with healthy or FI mandibular molars were included. The radiographs were cropped into individual molar images, annotated as " healthy" or " FI," and divided into training, validation, and testing datasets. The images were preprocessed by PyTorch transformations. ResNet-18, a convolutional neural network model, was refined using the PyTorch deep learning framework for the specific imaging classification task. CrossEntropyLoss and the AdamW optimizer were employed for loss function training and optimizing the learning rate, respectively. The images were loaded by PyTorch DataLoader for efficiency. The performance of ResNet-18 algorithm was evaluated with multiple metrics, including training and validation losses, confusion matrix, accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve, and the area under the ROC curve.

Results: After adequate training, ResNet-18 classified healthy vs. FI molars in the testing set with an accuracy of 96.47%, indicating its suitability for image classification.

Conclusion: The deep learning algorithm developed in this study was shown to be promising for classifying mandibular molar FI. It could serve as a valuable supplemental tool for detecting and managing periodontal diseases.