Accurate Segmentation of Dental Panoramic Radiographs with U-NETS

Fully convolutional neural networks (FCNs) have proven to be powerful tools for medical image segmentation. We apply an FCN based on the U-Net architecture for the challenging task of semantic segmentation of dental panoramic radiographs and discuss general tricks for improving segmentation performance. Among those are network ensembling, test-time augmentation, data symmetry exploitation and bootstrapping of low quality annotations. The performance of our approach was tested on a highly variable dataset of 1500 dental panoramic radiographs. A single network reached the Dice score of 0.934 where 1201 images were used for training, forming an ensemble increased the score to 0.936.