Automatic Tooth Recognition Method Including Detection of Root Canal Treatment on Panoramic X-Ray Images

Abstract

Panoramic X-ray images used in dentistry are taken with relatively low exposure and are a modality that can record the condition of the teeth in the patient’s mouth. In dental practice, these images are read and a patient’s medical record is prepared, but this is time-consuming for the dentist and may lead to erroneous entries. In addition, matching dental information in a database is also effective for rapid identification of bodies in the event of a large-scale disaster. Therefore, methods have been developed to automatically recognize patient information such as teeth and treatment scars from panoramic X-ray images. These methods mainly target untreated teeth for recognition, and there are still few methods that target prosthetic or root canal treated teeth. In this study, a method focusing on root canal treatment scars was added to the existing automatic tooth recognition framework, aiming to improve recognition accuracy and to create more detailed tooth charts. As a result, proposed method for the dataset including 2582 panoramic radiographs and 1740 root canals, 93.6% accuracy rate was achieved for tooth recognition by cross-validation. The precision of the root canal treatment alone was 94.6%, confirmed by the improved accuracy of the root canal treatment detection in the automatic tooth recognition.