Trabeculae microstructure parameters serve as effective predictors for marginal bone loss of dental implant in the mandible
Abstract Background: To investigate the effectiveness and feasibility of machine learning models based on trabecular microstructure parameters for predicting the occurrence of marginal bone loss (MBL) of the submerged dental implant in mandible. Methods: Clinical variables and morphological parameters of trabecular bone were collected from 81 subjects with submerged implants in the mandible (41 cases of abnormal MBL and 40 as normal controls). We measured the peri-implant MBL level by a cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT) at the follow-up of 20.95±2.67 months after functional loading. The morphological parameters and possible factors associated with MBL were collected in a mean of 3.98±1.06 months at the early loading stage. All variables were analyzed using correlation and covariance matrices. Support vector machine (SVM), artificial neural network (ANN), logistic regression (LR) model and random forest (RF) were actualized to predict abnormal MBL.Results: At the early stage of functional loading, the abnormal MBL cases showed a significant increase of structure model index (SMI) and trabecular pattern factor (Tb.Pf) in peri-implant. Meanwhile, SMI and Tb.Pf simultaneously revealed a significantly high positive correlation with MBL. The SVM model exhibited the best outcome in predicting MBL (AUC = 0.967), followed by ANN (AUC = 0.928), LR (AUC = 0.906), RF (AUC = 0.842), SMI alone (AUC = 0.705) and Tb.Pf alone (AUC = 0.663). Compared with one single predictor, all algorithm models yielded significantly superior performance.Conclusion: Abnormal MBL cases demonstrated the premonitory morphological variation in trabecular bone at the early stage. MBL prediction could be achieved by machine learning methods.