Artificial intelligence system for automated landmark localization and analysis of cephalometry

OBJECTIVES: Cephalometric analysis is essential for diagnosis, treatment planning and outcome assessment of orthodontics and orthognathic surgery. Utilizing artificial intelligence (AI) to achieve automated landmark localization has proved feasible and convenient. However, current systems remain insufficient for clinical application, as patients exhibit various malocclusions in cephalograms produced by different manufacturers while limited cephalograms were applied to train AI in these systems. METHODS: A robust and clinically applicable AI system was proposed for automatic cephalometric analysis. First, 9870 cephalograms taken by different radiography machines with various malocclusions of patients were collected from 20 medical institutions. Then 30 landmarks of all these cephalogram samples were manually annotated to train an AI system, composed of a two-stage convolutional neural network and a software-as-a-service system. Further, more than 100 orthodontists participated to refine the AI-output landmark localizations and retrain this system. RESULTS: The average landmark prediction error of this system was as low as 0.94 ± 0.74 mm and the system achieved an average classification accuracy of 89.33%. CONCLUSIONS: An automatic cephalometric analysis system based on convolutional neural network was proposed, which can realize automatic landmark location and cephalometric measurements classification. This system showed promise in improving diagnostic efficiency in clinical circumstances.