ABSTRACT

This study aimed to evaluate the success rates of the artificial neural network models (NNMs) and naive Bayes models (NBMs) trained with various cervical vertebra ratios in cephalometric radiographs for determining growth and development.

Our retrospective study was performed on 360 individuals between the ages of 8 and 17 years, whose cephalometric radiographs were taken. According to the evaluation of cephalometric radiographs, growth and development periods were divided into 6 vertebral stages. Each stage was considered as a group, each group had 30 girls and 30 boys. Twenty-eight cervical vertebral ratios were obtained by using 10 horizontal and 13 vertical measurements. These 28 vertebral ratios were combined in 4 different combinations, leading to 4 different datasets. Each dataset was split into 2 parts as training and testing. To prevent the overfitting, a 5-cross fold validation technique was also used in the training phase. The experiments were conducted on 2 different train/test ratios as 80%-20% and 70%-30% for both NNMs and NBMs.

The highest determination success rate was obtained in NNM 3 (0.95) and the lowest in NBM 4 (0.50). The determination success of NBM 1 and NBM 3 was almost similar (0.60). The success of NNM 2 did not differ much from that of NNM 1 (0.94). The determination success of stage 5 was relatively lower than the others in NNM 1 and NNM 2 (0.83).

The NNMs were more successful than the NBMs in our developed models. It is important to determine the effective ratio and/or measurements that will be useful for differentiation.