A separated endodontic instrument is one of the challenging complications of root canal treatment. The purpose of this study was to compare two deep learning methods that are convolutional neural network (CNN) and long short-term memory (LSTM) to detect the separated endodontic instruments on dental radiographs.

Panoramic radiographs from the hospital archive were retrospectively evaluated by two dentists. A total of 915 teeth, of which 417 are labeled as “separated instrument” and 498 are labeled as “healthy root canal treatment” were included. A total of six deep learning models, four of which are some varieties of CNN (Raw-CNN, Augmented-CNN, Gabor filtered-CNN, Gabor-filtered-augmented-CNN) and two of which are some varieties of LSTM model (Raw-LSTM, Augmented-LSTM) were trained based on several feature extraction methods with an applied or not applied an augmentation procedure. The diagnostic performances of the models were compared in terms of accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, positive and negative predictive value using ten-fold cross-validation. A McNemar’s tests was employed to figure out if there is a statistically significant difference between performances of the models. Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curves were developed to assess the quality of the performance of the most promising model (Gabor filtered-CNN model) by exploring different cut-off levels in the last decision layer of the model.

The Gabor filtered-CNN model showed the highest accuracy (84.37 ± 2.79), sensitivity (81.26 ± 4.79), positive predictive value (84.16 ± 3.35) and negative predictive value (84.62 ± 4.56 with a confidence interval of 80.6 ± 0.0076. McNemar’s tests yielded that the performance of the Gabor filtered-CNN model significantly different from both LSTM models (p < 0.01).

Both CNN and LSTM models were achieved a high predictive performance on to distinguish separated endodontic instruments in radiographs. The Gabor filtered-CNN model without data augmentation gave the best predictive performance.