Cervical Vertebral Maturation Assessment using various Machine Learning techniques on Lateral cephalogram: A systematic literature review

IMPORTANCE: For the assessment of optimum treatment timing in dentofacial orthopedics, understanding the growth process is of paramount importance. The evaluation of skeletal maturity based on study of the morphology of the cervical vertebrae has been devised to minimize radiation exposure of a patient due to hand wrist radiography. Cervical vertebral maturation assessment (CVMA) predictions have been examined in the state-of-the-art machine learning techniques in the recent past which require more attention and validation by clinicians and practitioners. OBJECTIVES: This paper aimed to answer the question “How are machine learning techniques being employed in studies concerning cervical vertebral maturation assessment using lateral cephalograms?” METHOD: A systematic search through the available literature was performed for this work based upon the Population, Intervention, Comparison and Outcome (PICO) framework. DATA SOURCES, STUDY SELECTION, DATA EXTRACTION AND SYNTHESIS: The searches were performed in Ovid Medline, Embase, PubMed and Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL) and Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews (CDSR). A search of the grey literature was also performed in Google Scholar and OpenGrey. We also did a hand-searching in the Angle Orthodontist, Journal of Orthodontics and Craniofacial Research, Progress in Orthodontics, and the American Journal of Orthodontics and Dentofacial Orthopedics. References from the included articles were also searched. MAIN OUTCOME(S) AND MEASURE(S), RESULTS: A total of 25 papers which were assessed for full text, and 13 papers were included for the systematic review. The machine learning methods used were scrutinized according to their performance and comparison to human observers/experts. The accuracy of the models ranged between 60 and 90% or above, and satisfactory agreement and correlation with the human observers. CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE: Machine learning models can be used for detection and classification of the cervical vertebrae maturation. In this systematic review (SR), the studies were summarized in terms of ML techniques applied, sample data, age range of sample and conventional method for CVMA, which showed that further studies with a uniform distribution of samples equally in stages of maturation and according to the gender is required for better training of the models in order to generalize the outputs for prolific use to target population.