Imaging examinations are of remarkable importance for diagnostic support in Dentistry. Imaging techniques allow analysis of dental and maxillofacial tissues (e.g., bone, dentine, and enamel) that are inaccessible through clinical examination, which aids in the diagnosis of diseases as well as treatment planning. The analysis of imaging exams is not trivial; so, it is usually performed by oral and maxillofacial radiologists. The increasing demand for imaging examinations motivates the development of an automatic classification system for diagnostic support, as proposed in this paper, in which we aim to classify teeth as healthy or with endodontic lesion. The classification system was developed based on a Siamese Network combined with the use of convolutional neural networks with transfer learning for VGG-16 and DenseNet-121 networks. For this purpose, a database with 1000 sagittal and coronal sections of cone-beam CT scans was used. The results in terms of accuracy, recall, precision, specificity, and F1-score show that the proposed system has a satisfactory classification performance. The innovative automatic classification system led to an accuracy of about 70%. The work is pioneer since, to the authors knowledge, no other previous work has used a Siamese Network for the purpose of classifying teeth as healthy or with endodontic lesion, based on cone-beam computed tomography images.
Signal processing is a very useful field of study in the interpretation of signals in many everyday applications. In the case of applications with time-varying signals, one possibility is to consider them as graphs, so graph theory arises, which extends classical methods to the non-Euclidean domain. In addition, machine learning techniques have been widely used in pattern recognition activities in a wide variety of tasks, including health sciences. The objective of this work is to identify and analyze the papers in the literature that address the use of machine learning applied to graph signal processing in health sciences. A search was performed in four databases (Science Direct, IEEE Xplore, ACM, and MDPI), using search strings to identify papers that are in the scope of this review. Finally, 45 papers were included in the analysis, the first being published in 2015, which indicates an emerging area. Among the gaps found, we can mention the need for better clinical interpretability of the results obtained in the papers, that is not to restrict the results or conclusions simply to performance metrics. In addition, a possible research direction is the use of new transforms. It is also important to make new public datasets available that can be used to train the models.