The U-Net Approaches to Evaluation of Dental Bite-Wing Radiographs: An Artificial Intelligence Study

Bite-wing radiographs are one of the most used intraoral radiography techniques in dentistry. AI is extremely important in terms of more efficient patient care in the field of dentistry. The aim of this study was to perform a diagnostic evaluation on bite-wing radiographs with an AI model based on CNNs. In this study, 500 bite-wing radiographs in the radiography archive of Eskişehir Osmangazi University, Faculty of Dentistry, Department of Oral and Maxillofacial Radiology were used. The CranioCatch labeling program (CranioCatch, Eskisehir, Turkey) with tooth decays, crowns, pulp, restoration material, and root-filling material for five different diagnoses were made by labeling the segmentation technique. The U-Net architecture was used to develop the AI model. F1 score, sensitivity, and precision results of the study, respectively, caries 0.8818–0.8235–0.9491, crown; 0.9629–0.9285–1, pulp; 0.9631–0.9843–0.9429, with restoration material; and 0.9714–0.9622–0.9807 was obtained as 0.9722–0.9459–1 for the root filling material. This study has shown that an AI model can be used to automatically evaluate bite-wing radiographs and the results are promising. Owing to these automatically prepared charts, physicians in a clinical intense tempo will be able to work more efficiently and quickly.