Deep learning-based assessment of pulp involvement in primary molars using YOLO v8
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Dental caries is a major global public health problem, especially among young children. Rapid decay progression often necessitates pulp treatment, making accurate pulp condition assessment crucial. Despite advances in pulp management techniques, diagnostic methods for assessing pulp involvement have not significantly improved. This study aimed to develop a machine learning (ML) model to diagnose pulp involvement using radiographs of carious primary molars. Clinical charts and bitewing radiographs of 900 children treated from 2018-2022 at the University of Alberta dental clinic were reviewed, yielding a sample of 482 teeth. images were preprocessed, standardized, and labeled based on clinical diagnoses. Data were split into training, validation, and test sets, with data augmentation applied to classify 2 categories of outcomes. The YOLOv8m-cls model architecture included convolutional and classification layers, and performance was evaluated using top-1 and top-5 accuracy metrics. The YOLOv8m-cls model achieved a top-1 accuracy of 78.7% for upper primary molars and 87.8% for lower primary molars. Validation datasets showed higher accuracy for lower primary teeth. Performance on new test images demonstrated precision, recall, accuracy, and F1-scores, highlighting the model's effectiveness in diagnosing pulp involvement, with lower primary molars showing superior results. This study developed a promising CNN model for diagnosing pulp involvement in primary teeth using bitewing radiographs, showing promise for clinical application in pediatric dentistry. Future research should explore whole bitewing images, include clinical variables, and integrate heat maps to enhance the model. This tool could streamline clinical practice, improve informed consent, and assist in dental student training.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".