Deep Learning Models for Evaluating the Anatomical Relationship Between Posterior Maxillary Teeth and Maxillary Sinus in Panoramic Radiographs

Abstract

Objectives Accurate evaluation of the anatomical relationship between posterior maxillary teeth and the maxillary sinus is critical in dental treatments such as orthodontics, surgery, and implantology. This study investigates the efficacy of deep learning models applied to panoramic images for predicting this anatomical relationship.Materials and Methods A total of 300 panoramic images and 1760 cropped slices were collected and converted to PNG format at a resolution of 512 x 512 pixels. Three convolutional neural network architectures-VGG, ResNet, and ResNeXt-were trained and evaluated. The dataset was split into training (80), validation (10), and testing (10) sets. Performance metrics included accuracy, precision, recall, F1 score, ROC-AUC, and confusion matrices.Results The VGG model achieved an accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score of 0.84, with an ROC-AUC of 0.89. ResNet and ResNeXt demonstrated superior performance with all metrics at 0.88 and ROC-AUC values of 0.93 and 0.94, respectively. Both ResNet and ResNeXt showed signs of overfitting after 30-50 epochs, suggesting the need for early stopping or regularization. False positives mainly occurred in second molars falsely classified as contacting the sinus.Conclusion Deep learning models, particularly ResNet and ResNeXt, provide reliable assessment of the anatomical relationship between posterior maxillary teeth and the maxillary sinus using panoramic radiographs. These models can serve as efficient diagnostic aids when CBCT is unavailable, improving clinical decision-making in panoramic images.