Automated detection of posterior restorations in permanent teeth using artificial intelligence on intraoral photographs

Intraoral photographs might be considered the machine-readable equivalent of a clinical-based visual examination and can potentially be used to detect and categorize dental restorations. The first objective of this study was to develop a deep learning-based convolutional neural network (CNN) for automated detection and categorization of posterior composite, cement, amalgam, gold and ceramic restorations on clinical photographs. Second, this study aimed to determine the diagnostic accuracy for the developed CNN (test method) compared to that of an expert evaluation (reference standard). The whole image set of 1761 images (483 of unrestored teeth, 570 of composite restorations, 213 of cements, 278 of amalgam restorations, 125 of gold restorations and 92 of ceramic restorations) was divided into a training set (N = 1407, 401, 447, 66, 231, 93, and 169, respectively) and a test set (N = 354, 82, 123, 26, 47, 32, and 44). The expert diagnoses served as a reference standard for cyclic training and repeated evaluation of the CNN (ResNeXt-101–32 × 8d), which was trained by using image augmentation and transfer learning. Statistical analysis included the calculation of contingency tables, areas under the receiver operating characteristic curve and saliency maps. After training was complete, the CNN was able to categorize restorations correctly with the following diagnostic accuracy values: 94.9% for unrestored teeth, 92.9% for composites, 98.3% for cements, 99.2% for amalgam restorations, 99.4% for gold restorations and 97.8% for ceramic restorations. It was possible to categorize different types of posterior restorations on intraoral photographs automatically with a good diagnostic accuracy. Dental diagnostics might be supported by artificial intelligence-based algorithms in the future. However, further improvements are needed to increase accuracy and practicability.