Evaluation of automated cephalometric analysis based on the latest deep learning method

Abstract

Objectives: To compare an automated cephalometric analysis based on the latest deep learning method of automatically identifying cephalometric landmarks (AI) with previously published AI according to the test style of the worldwide AI challenges at the International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging conferences held by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE ISBI).

Materials and methods: This latest AI was developed by using a total of 1983 cephalograms as training data. In the training procedures, a modification of a contemporary deep learning method, YOLO version 3 algorithm, was applied. Test data consisted of 200 cephalograms. To follow the same test style of the AI challenges at IEEE ISBI, a human examiner manually identified the IEEE ISBI-designated 19 cephalometric landmarks, both in training and test data sets, which were used as references for comparison. Then, the latest AI and another human examiner independently detected the same landmarks in the test data set. The test results were compared by the measures that appeared at IEEE ISBI: the success detection rate (SDR) and the success classification rates (SCR).

Results: SDR of the latest AI in the 2-mm range was 75.5% and SCR was 81.5%. These were greater than any other previous AIs. Compared to the human examiners, AI showed a superior success classification rate in some cephalometric analysis measures.

Conclusions: This latest AI seems to have superior performance compared to previous AI methods. It also seems to demonstrate cephalometric analysis comparable to human examiners.

Keywords: Artificial intelligence; Deep learning; Machine learning.

Figure 1.

The experimental design of the present study.

Figure 2.

Scatter plots with 95% confidence ellipses for the landmark detection errors.