Artificial intelligence-assisted identification of condensing osteitis and idiopathic osteosclerosis on panoramic radiographs

Idiopathic osteosclerosis (IOS) and condensing osteitis (CO) represent radiopaque lesions often detected incidentally within the jaws, posing substantial diagnostic challenges due to their overlapping radiographic characteristics. The objective of this study was to assess the diagnostic efficacy of YOLOv8 and YOLOv11 deep learning algorithms in the identification of IOS and CO lesions on panoramic radiographs. A comprehensive collection of 1,000 panoramic images was retrospectively gathered and meticulously annotated utilizing a bounding box approach by two proficient oral and maxillofacial radiologists. All images were standardized to a resolution of 640 × 640 pixels and segregated into training (70%), validation (15%), and testing (15%) subsets. The performance of the models was evaluated based on metrics including accuracy, sensitivity, precision, F1 score, and the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC). YOLOv11 achieved notable precision scores of 98.8% for IOS and 97.1% for CO, alongside F1 scores of 96.8% and 95.6%, respectively. Conversely, YOLOv8 produced precision scores of 96.6% for IOS and 91.4% for CO, with F1 scores of 94% and 90%. These findings illustrate that AI-enhanced deep learning models possess the capability to accurately identify IOS and CO lesions, thereby presenting opportunities to improve diagnostic consistency, avert unnecessary invasive procedures, and facilitate more effective treatment planning within clinical practice.