The use of panoramic radiography to determine the relationship between the mandibular third molar and the inferior alveolar canal is a clinical norm; however, this requires high clinical experience and can lead to difficulties in estimating the surgical difficulty.
AI may help classify the relationship between the mandibular third molar and inferior alveolar canal in future suggests a new study published in the Journal of Dentistry.

The aim of this study is to automatically assess the positional relationship between lower third molars (M3i) and the mandibular canal (MC) based on the panoramic radiograph(s) (PR(s)).This study applied artificial intelligence (AI)–based deep learning model for the positional assessment of the mandibular third molar and mandibular canal.
A total of 1444 M3s were manually annotated and labeled on 863 PRs as a reference. A deep-learning approach, based on MobileNet-V2 combination with a skeletonization algorithm and a signed distance method, was trained and validated on 733 PRs with 1227 M3s to classify the positional relationship between M3i and MC into three categories. Subsequently, the trained algorithm was applied to a test set consisting of 130 PRs (217 M3s). Accuracy, precision, sensitivity, specificity, negative predictive value, and F1-score were calculated.
Results
The proposed method achieved a weighted accuracy of 0.951, precision of 0.943, sensitivity of 0.941, specificity of 0.800, negative predictive value of 0.865 and an F1-score of 0.938.
AI-enhanced assessment of PRs can objectively, accurately, and reproducibly determine the positional relationship between M3i and MC.The use of such an explainable AI system can assist clinicians in the intuitive positional assessment of lower third molars and mandibular canals. Further research is required to automatically assess the risk of alveolar nerve injury on panoramic radiographs.
Reference:
Steven Kempers, Pieter van Lierop, Tzu-Ming Harry Hsu, David Anssari Moin, Stefaan Bergé, Hossein Ghaeminia, Tong Xi, Shankeeth Vinayahalingam,
Positional assessment of lower third molar and mandibular canal using explainable artificial intelligence. Journal of Dentistry, Volume 133, 2023, 104519, ISSN 0300-5712, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jdent.2023.10451