Yunus Hazar

This study aims to evaluate the ability of an artificial intelligence (AI) model developed for use in the field of orthodontics to accurately and reliably classify skeletal maturation stages of individuals using hand–wrist radiographs. A total of 809 grayscale hand–wrist radiographs (250 × 250 px; pre-peak n = 400, peak n = 100, post-peak n = 309) were analyzed using four complementary image-based feature extraction methods: Local Binary Pattern (LBP), Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG), Zernike Moments (ZM), and Intensity Histogram (IH). These methods generated 2355 features per image, of which 2099 were retained after variance thresholding. The most informative 1250 features were selected using the ANOVA F-test and classified with a stacking-based machine learning (ML) architecture composed of Light Gradient Boosting Machine (LightGBM) and Logistic Regression (LR) as base learners, and Random Forest (RF) as the meta-learner. Across all evaluation folds, the average performance of the model was Accuracy = 83.42%, Precision = 84.48%, Recall = 83.42%, and F1 = 83.50%. The proposed model achieved 87.5% accuracy, 87.8% precision, 87.5% recall, and an F1-score of 87.6% in 10-fold cross-validation, with a macro-average area under the ROC curve (AUC) of 0.96. The pre-peak stage, corresponding to the period of maximum growth velocity, was identified with 92.5% accuracy. These findings indicate that integrating handcrafted radiographic features with ensemble learning can enhance diagnostic precision, reduce observer variability, and accelerate evaluation. The model provides an interpretable and clinically applicable AI-based decision-support tool for skeletal maturity assessment in orthodontic practice.