Influence of growth structures and fixed appliances on automated cephalometric landmark recognition with a customized convolutional neural network

Popova, Teodora; Stocker, Thomas; Khazaei, Yeganeh; Malenova, Yoana; Wichelhaus, Andrea; Sabbagh, Hisham (2023): Influence of growth structures and fixed appliances on automated cephalometric landmark recognition with a customized convolutional neural network. BMC Oral Health, 23 (1). ISSN 1472-6831

Abstract

Background
One of the main uses of artificial intelligence in the field of orthodontics is automated cephalometric analysis. Aim of the present study was to evaluate whether developmental stages of a dentition, fixed orthodontic appliances or other dental appliances may affect detection of cephalometric landmarks.

Methods
For the purposes of this study a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for automated detection of cephalometric landmarks was developed. The model was trained on 430 cephalometric radiographs and its performance was then tested on 460 new radiographs. The accuracy of landmark detection in patients with permanent dentition was compared with that in patients with mixed dentition. Furthermore, the influence of fixed orthodontic appliances and orthodontic brackets and/or bands was investigated only in patients with permanent dentition. A t-test was performed to evaluate the mean radial errors (MREs) against the corresponding SDs for each landmark in the two categories, of which the significance was set at p < 0.05.

Results
The study showed significant differences in the recognition accuracy of the Ap-Inferior point and the Is-Superior point between patients with permanent dentition and mixed dentition, and no significant differences in the recognition process between patients without fixed orthodontic appliances and patients with orthodontic brackets and/or bands and other fixed orthodontic appliances.

Conclusions
The results indicated that growth structures and developmental stages of a dentition had an impact on the performance of the customized CNN model by dental cephalometric landmarks. Fixed orthodontic appliances such as brackets, bands, and other fixed orthodontic appliances, had no significant effect on the performance of the CNN model.

• Doc-Type: Article (LMU Hospital)
• Organisational unit (Faculties): 07 Medicine > Medical Center of the University of Munich > Polyclinic for Dental Preservation and Periodontology
• DFG subject classification of scientific disciplines: Life sciences
• DFG: Funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) - 491502892