Automatic detection of mandibular fractures in panoramic radiographs using deep learning

Mandibular fracture is one of the most frequent injuries in oral and maxillo-facial surgery. Radiologists diagnose mandibular fractures using panoramic radiography and cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT). Panoramic radiography is a conventional imaging modality, which is less complicated than CBCT. This paper proposes the diagnosis method of mandibular fractures in a panoramic radiograph based on a deep learning system without the intervention of radiologists. The deep learning system used has a one-stage detection called you only look once (YOLO). To improve detection accuracy, panoramic radiographs as input images are augmented using gamma modulation, multi-bounding boxes, single-scale luminance adaptation transform, and multi-scale luminance adaptation transform methods. Our results showed better detection performance than the conventional method using YOLO-based deep learning. Hence, it will be helpful for radiologists to double-check the diagnosis of mandibular fractures.