Automated Implant Placement Pathway from Dental Panoramic Radiographs Using Deep Learning for Preliminary Clinical Assistance.

Background/Objective: Dental implant therapy requires clinicians to identify edentulous regions and adjacent teeth accurately to ensure precise and efficient implant placement. However, this process is time-consuming and subject to operator bias. To address this challenge, this study proposes an AI-assisted detection framework that integrates deep learning and image processing techniques to predict implant placement pathways on dental panoramic radiographs, supporting clinical decision-making. Methods: The proposed framework is first applied to YOLO models to detect edentulous regions and employs image enhancement techniques to improve image quality. Subsequently, YOLO-OBB is utilized to extract pixel-level positional information about neighboring healthy teeth. An implant pathway orientation visualization algorithm is applied to derive clinically relevant implant placement recommendations. Results: Experimental evaluation using YOLOv9m and YOLOv8n-OBB demonstrated stable performance in both recognition and accuracy. The models achieved Precision values of 88.86% and 89.82%, respectively, with an average angular error of only 1.537° compared to clinical implant pathways annotated by dentists. Conclusions: This study presents the first AI-assisted diagnostic framework for DPR-based implant pathway prediction. The results indicate strong consistency with clinical planning, confirming its potential to enhance diagnostic accuracy and provide reliable decision support in implant dentistry.