Recognition of tooth numbers and conditions on dental panoramic radiographs for assisting dental chart filing

Abstract

Dental panoramic radiographs are often obtained at dental clinic visits for diagnosis and recording purposes. Automated filing of dental charts can help dentists in reducing their workload and improving diagnostic efficiency. The purpose of this study is to develop a system that prerecords a dental chart by recognizing teeth with their numbers and restoration history on dental panoramic radiographs. The proposed system uses YOLO which detects 16 types of teeth and restoration conditions simultaneously. Based on the detected tooth types, they were further classified into 32 types and combined with the tooth conditions by post-processing. We tested our method on 870 panoramic images obtained at 10 different facilities by 5-fold cross validation. The proposed method obtained 0.99 recall and precision for recognition of 32 tooth types and 0.90 recall and 0.90 precision on determining the tooth condition. It has the potential to assist prefiling the dental charts for efficient dental care.