Deep Learning-based Semantic Segmentation of Dental Radiographs: Comparative Evaluation of PSPNet, DeepLabv3, UNet, and UNet++

Accurate and efficient analysis of dental radiographs has become increasingly important for disease diagnosis and clinical decision making. In particular, dental radiographs segmentation plays a critical role as it is challenging due to several reasons, such as low contrast, noise in the images, variations in the image quality, etc. Previous studies have primarily addressed these challenges using convolutional neural networks (CNN)-based models. However, direct comparison of these segmentation models is still challenging due to the variations among the experimental settings. Therefore, we mainly compared four segmentation models, including Pyramid Scene Parsing Network (PSPNet), DeepLabV3, UNet, and UNet++, through a fair, controlled experimentation setting under varying conditions such as image sizes and batch sizes. For this, we used 1269 dental radiography images, and prior to training, we implemented a series of preprocessing techniques. To assess the models, we used several metrics, including Dice coefficient (DICE), Intersection over Union (IoU), accuracy, precision, training and validation losses. According to our results, UNet++ demonstrated the highest IoU score of 0.6719, and a DICE value of 0.7869, showing superior results in terms of segmentation, specifically when configured with an image size of 300x300 and a batch size of 16. In addition, we also explored the effect of image resolutions and batch sizes on model performance and accuracy under different architectures. Therefore, this study provides insights into the strengths of different segmentation models and the potential of deep learning-based semantic segmentation methods for improving automated dental radiograph analysis.