Artificial intelligence and infrared thermography as auxiliary tools in the diagnosis of temporomandibular disorder

Objective: To assess three machine learning (ML) attribute extraction methods: radiomic, semantic and radiomic-semantic association on temporomandibular disorder (TMD) detection using infrared thermography (IT); and to determine which ML classifier, KNN, SVM and MLP, is the most efficient for this purpose. Methods and materials: 78 patients were selected by applying the Fonseca questionnaire and RDC/TMD to categorize control patients (37) and TMD patients (41). IT lateral projections of each patient were acquired. The masseter and temporal muscles were selected as regions of interest (ROI) for attribute extraction. Three methods of extracting attributes were assessed: radiomic, semantic and radiomic-semantic association. For radiomic attribute extraction, 20 texture attributes were assessed using co-occurrence matrix in a standardized angulation of 0 degrees. The semantic features were the ROI mean temperature and pain intensity data. For radiomic-semantic association, a single dataset composed of 28 features was assessed. The classification algorithms assessed were KNN, SVM and MLP. Hopkins's statistic, Shapiro-Wilk, ANOVA and Tukey tests were used to assess data. The significance level was set at 5% (p < 0.05). Results: Training and testing accuracy values differed statistically for the radiomic-semantic association (p = 0.003). MLP differed from the other classifiers for the radiomic-semantic association (p = 0.004). Accuracy, precision and sensitivity values of semantic and radiomic-semantic association differed statistically from radiomic features (p = 0.008, p = 0.016 and p = 0.013). Conclusion: Semantic and radiomic-semantic-associated ML feature extraction methods and MLP classifier should be chosen for TMD detection using IT images and pain scale data. IT associated with ML presents promising results for TMD detection.