Human Gender Prediction Based on Deep Transfer Learning from Panoramic Radiograph Images
This work addresses the need for automated gender determination in forensic medicine, offering a faster and more accurate alternative to manual methods, though it is incremental as it applies existing deep learning techniques to a specific domain.
The study tackled gender prediction from panoramic dental radiographs by using a DenseNet121 model with transfer learning, achieving a success rate of 97.25% in binary classification.
Panoramic Dental Radiography (PDR) image processing is one of the most extensively used manual methods for gender determination in forensic medicine. With the assistance of the PDR images, a person's biological gender determination can be performed through analyzing skeletal structures expressing sexual dimorphism. Manual approaches require a wide range of mandibular parameter measurements in metric units. Besides being time-consuming, these methods also necessitate the employment of experienced professionals. In this context, deep learning models are widely utilized in the auto-analysis of radiological images nowadays, owing to their high processing speed, accuracy, and stability. In our study, a data set consisting of 24,000 dental panoramic images was prepared for binary classification, and the transfer learning method was used to accelerate the training and increase the performance of our proposed DenseNet121 deep learning model. With the transfer learning method, instead of starting the learning process from scratch, the existing patterns learned beforehand were used. Extensive comparisons were made using deep transfer learning (DTL) models VGG16, ResNet50, and EfficientNetB6 to assess the classification performance of the proposed model in PDR images. According to the findings of the comparative analysis, the proposed model outperformed the other approaches by achieving a success rate of 97.25% in gender classification.