Performance Evaluation of a Deep Learning Model for Automatic Detection and Localization of Idiopathic Osteosclerosis on Dental Panoramic Radiographs

Idiopathic osteosclerosis (IO) are focal radiopacities of unknown etiology observed in the jaws. These radiopacities are incidentally detected on dental panoramic radiographs taken for other reasons. In this study, we investigated the performance of a deep learning model in detecting IO using a small dataset of dental panoramic radiographs with varying contrasts and features. Two radiologists collected 175 IO-diagnosed dental panoramic radiographs from the dental school database. The dataset size is limited due to the rarity of IO, with its incidence in the Turkish population reported as 2.7% in studies. To overcome this limitation, data augmentation was performed by horizontally flipping the images, resulting in an augmented dataset of 350 panoramic radiographs. The images were annotated by two radiologists and divided into approximately 70% for training (245 radiographs), 15% for validation (53 radiographs), and 15% for testing (52 radiographs). The study employing the YOLOv5 deep learning model evaluated the results using precision, recall, F1-score, mAP (mean Average Precision), and average inference time score metrics. The training and testing processes were conducted on the Google Colab Pro virtual machine. The test process's performance criteria were obtained with a precision value of 0.981, a recall value of 0.929, an F1-score value of 0.954, and an average inference time of 25.4 ms. Although radiographs diagnosed with IO have a small dataset and exhibit different contrasts and features, it has been observed that the deep learning model provides high detection speed, accuracy, and localization results. The automatic identification of IO lesions using artificial intelligence algorithms, with high success rates, can contribute to the clinical workflow of dentists by preventing unnecessary biopsy procedure.