Using panoramic radiographs, AI to identify atherosclerosis

Researchers evaluated whether artificial intelligence models could help detect carotid artery calcifications on panoramic radiographs.

Dental professionals may have limited training regarding the identification of carotid artery calcifications — leading to missed diagnoses.

In a study published in the Journal of Dentistry, the researchers assessed more than 6,400 panoramic radiographs for the presence of carotid artery calcifications. The images were manually annotated by an oral radiologist and reviewed by three experienced clinicians to establish consensus. They then used 370 panoramic radiographs with carotid artery calcifications to train an AI model and compared its performance with that of convolutional neural networks.

Compared with the convolutional neural networks, the novel AI model was found to be more accurate at predicting the presence of carotid artery calcifications. The findings suggested that the approach could be integrated into dental imaging to assist in the early detection of carotid artery calcifications.

Read more: Journal of Dentistry

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