Experimental validation of computer-vision methods for the successful detection of endodontic treatment obturation and progression from noisy radiographs

Purpose (1) To evaluate the effects of denoising and data balancing on deep learning to detect endodontic treatment outcomes from radiographs. (2) To develop and train a deep-learning model and classifier to predict obturation quality from radiomics. Methods The study conformed to the STARD 2015 and MI-CLAIMS 2021 guidelines. 250 deidentified dental radiographs were collected and augmented to produce 2226 images. The dataset was classified according to endodontic treatment outcomes following a set of customized criteria. The dataset was denoised and balanced, and processed with YOLOv5s, YOLOv5x, and YOLOv7 models of real-time deep-learning computer vision. Diagnostic test parameters such as sensitivity (Sn), specificity (Sp), accuracy (Ac), precision, recall, mean average precision (mAP), and confidence were evaluated. Results Overall accuracy for all the deep-learning models was above 85%. Imbalanced datasets with noise removal led to YOLOv5x’s prediction accuracy to drop to 72%, while balancing and noise removal led to all three models performing at over 95% accuracy. mAP saw an improvement from 52 to 92% following balancing and denoising. Conclusion The current study of computer vision applied to radiomic datasets successfully classified endodontic treatment obturation and mishaps according to a custom progressive classification system and serves as a foundation to larger research on the subject matter.