Transfer deep learning for dental and maxillofacial imaging modality classification: A preliminary study

Objective: To apply the technique of transfer deep learning on a small data set for automatic classification of X-ray modalities in dentistry. Study design: For solving the problem of classification, the convolution neural networks based on VGG16, NASNetLarge and Xception architectures were used, which received pre-training on ImageNet subset. In this research, we used an in-house dataset created within the School of Dental Medicine, Tel Aviv University. The training dataset contained anonymized 496 digital Panoramic and Cephalometric X-ray images for orthodontic examinations from CS 8100 Digital Panoramic System (Carestream Dental LLC, Atlanta, USA). The models were trained using NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti GPU. The study was approved by the ethical committee of Tel Aviv University. Results: The test dataset contained 124 X-ray images from 2 different devices: CS 8100 Digital Panoramic System and Planmeca ProMax 2D (Planmeca, Helsinki, Finland). X-ray images in the test database were not pre-processed. The accuracy of all neural network architectures was 100%. Following a result of almost absolute accuracy, the other statistical metrics were not relevant. Conclusions: In this study, good results have been obtained for the automatic classification of different modalities of X-ray images used in dentistry. The most promising direction for the development of this kind of application is the transfer deep learning. Further studies on automatic classification of modalities, as well as sub-modalities, can maximally reduce occasional difficulties arising in this field in the daily practice of the dentist and, eventually, improve the quality of diagnosis and treatment.