Can Super Resolution via Deep Learning Improve Classification Accuracy in Dental.

Objectives: Deep Learning-driven Super Resolution (SR) aims to enhance the quality and resolution of images, offering potential benefits in dental imaging. Although extensive research has focused on deep learning based dental classification tasks, the impact of applying super-resolution techniques on classification remains underexplored. This study seeks to address this gap by evaluating and comparing the performance of deep learning classification models on dental images with and without super-resolution enhancement.

Methods: An open-source dental image dataset was utilized to investigate the impact of SR on image classification performance. SR was applied by two models with a scaling ratio of 2 and 4, while classification was performed by four deep learning models. Performances were evaluated by well-accepted metrics like SSIM, PSNR, accuracy, recall, precision, and F1-score. The effect of SR on classification performance is interpreted through two different approaches.

Results: Two SR models yielded average SSIM and PSNR values of 0.904 and 36.71 for increasing resolution with two scaling ratios. Average accuracy and F-1 score for the classification trained and tested with two SR-generated images were 0.859 and 0.873. In the first of the comparisons carried out with two different approaches, it was observed that the accuracy increased in at least half of the cases (8 out of 16) when different models and scaling ratios were considered, while in the second approach, SR showed a significantly higher performance for almost all cases (12 out of 16).

Conclusion: This study demonstrated that the classification with SR-generated images significantly improved outcomes.

Advances in knowledge: For the first time, the classification performance of dental radiographs with improved resolution by SR has been investigated. Significant performance improvement was observed compared to the case without SR.