Objectives: This study aimed to examine the performance of deep learning object detection technology for detecting and identifying maxillary cyst-like lesions on panoramic radiography.
Methods: Altogether, 412 patients with maxillary cyst-like lesions (including several benign tumors) were enrolled. All panoramic radiographs were arbitrarily assigned to the training, testing 1, and testing 2 datasets of the study. The deep learning process of the training images and labels was performed for 1000 epochs using the DetectNet neural network. The testing 1 and testing 2 images were applied to the created learning model, and the detection performance was evaluated. For lesions that could be detected, the classification performance (sensitivity) for identifying radicular cysts or other lesions were examined.
Results: The recall, precision, and F-1 score for detecting maxillary cysts were 74.6%/77.1%, 89.8%/90.0%, and 81.5%/83.1% for the testing 1/testing 2 datasets, respectively. The recall was higher in the anterior regions and for radicular cysts. The sensitivity was higher for identifying radicular cysts than for other lesions.
Conclusions: Using deep learning object detection technology, maxillary cyst-like lesions could be detected in approximately 75-77%.
Keywords: Deep learning; Maxillary cysts; Object detection; Panoramic radiography; Radicular cysts.