Assessment of using transfer learning with different classifiers in hypodontia diagnosis.

Background: Hypodontia is the absence of one or more teeth in the primary or permanent dentition during development, and radiographic imaging is the most common method of diagnosis. However, in recent years, artificial intelligence-based decision support systems have been employed to make highly accurate diagnoses. The aim of this study was to classify single premolar agenesis, multiple premolar agenesis, and without tooth agenesis using various artificial intelligence approaches.

Methods: One thousand sixty-eight panoramic radiographs from pediatric patients aged between 6 and 12 years without systemic disease were sorted into three separate classes: single premolar agenesis (n = 336), multiple premolar agenesis (n = 324), and without tooth agenesis (n = 408). Pretrained convolutional neural network models (AlexNet, DarkNet-19, DarkNet-53, DenseNet-201, EfficientNet, GoogLeNet, InceptionV3, IncResV2, MobileNetV2, NasNet-Mobile, Places365, ResNet-18, ResNet-50, ResNet-101, ShuffleNet, SqueezeNet, VGG-16, VGG-19, and Xception) were used for training with the fine-tuning method and different machine learning classifiers (decision trees, discriminant analysis, logistic regression, naive Bayes, support vector machines, nearest neighbor, ensemble method, and artificial neural network). The dataset was divided into 80% for training and 20% for testing. Performance was evaluated via accuracy, recall, precision, F1-score, specificity and area under the curve (AUC) parameters.

Results: All of the data were classified via a VGG-19 model with a bilayered neural network classifier, which achieved 95.63% accuracy, 93.26% precision, 93.34% recall, 96.73% specificity, 93.25% F1-score and 95.03% AUC and was identified as the most successful model. The accuracy values for this model were distributed as follows: 96.72% for without tooth agenesis, 95.79% for multiple premolar agenesis, and 94.39% for single premolar agenesis.

Conclusions: Successful results of pretrained models have been demonstrated for the radiographic diagnosis of hypodontia in pediatric patients. It is expected that artificial intelligence approaches will facilitate the diagnosis of hypodontia.