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Privacy-preserving U-Net variants with pseudo-labeling for radiolucent lesion segmentation in dental CBCT

Ismail, Amelia Ritahani and Azlan, Faris Farhan and Noormaizan, Khairul Akmal and Afiqa, Nurul and Nisa, Syed Qamrun and Ghazali, Ahmad Badruddin and Pranolo, Andri and Saifullah, Shoffan (2025) Privacy-preserving U-Net variants with pseudo-labeling for radiolucent lesion segmentation in dental CBCT. International Journal of Advances in Intelligent Informatics, 11 (2). pp. 275-291. ISSN 2442-6571 E-ISSN 2548-3161

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Abstract

Accurate segmentation of radiolucent lesions in dental Cone-Beam Computed Tomography (CBCT) is vital for enhancing diagnostic reliability and reducing the burden on clinicians. This study proposes a privacy-preserving segmentation framework leveraging multiple U-Net variants—U-Net, DoubleU-Net, U2-Net, and Spatial Attention U-Net (SA-UNet)—to address challenges posed by limited labeled data and patient confidentiality concerns. To safeguard sensitive information, Differential Privacy Stochastic Gradient Descent (DP-SGD) is integrated using TensorFlow-Privacy, achieving a privacy budget of ε ≈ 1.5 with minimal performance degradation. Among the evaluated architectures, U2-Net demonstrates superior segmentation performance with a Dice coefficient of 0.833 and an Intersection over Union (IoU) of 0.881, showing less than 2% reduction under privacy constraints. To mitigate data annotation scarcity, a pseudo-labeling approach is implemented within an MLOps pipeline, enabling semi-supervised learning from unlabeled CBCT images. Over three iterative refinements, the pseudo-labeling strategy reduces validation loss by 14.4% and improves Dice score by 2.6%, demonstrating its effectiveness. Additionally, comparative evaluations reveal that SA-UNet offers competitive accuracy with faster inference time (22 ms per slice), making it suitable for low-resource deployments. The proposed approach presents a scalable and privacy-compliant framework for radiolucent lesion segmentation, supporting clinical decision-making in real-world dental imaging scenarios.

Item Type: Article (Journal)
Additional Information: 4296/122706
Uncontrolled Keywords: Radiolucent lesion segmentation, U-Net variants, Dental CBCT, Differential privacy, Pseudo-Labeling
Subjects: Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA76 Computer software
R Medicine > RK Dentistry
R Medicine > RK Dentistry > RK318 Oral and Dental Medicine. Pathology. Diseases-Therapeutics-General Works
Kulliyyahs/Centres/Divisions/Institutes (Can select more than one option. Press CONTROL button): Kulliyyah of Dentistry
Kulliyyah of Dentistry > Department of Oral Maxillofacial Surgery and Oral Diagnosis
Kulliyyah of Information and Communication Technology
Kulliyyah of Information and Communication Technology

Kulliyyah of Information and Communication Technology > Department of Computer Science
Kulliyyah of Information and Communication Technology > Department of Computer Science
Depositing User: Dr Ahmad Badruddin Ghazali
Date Deposited: 15 Aug 2025 16:35
Last Modified: 15 Aug 2025 16:35
URI: http://irep.iium.edu.my/id/eprint/122706

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