Self-Supervised Vision Transformers for CBCT-Based Detection of Temporomandibular Joint Osteoarthritis
Researchers demonstrate that self-supervised Vision Transformers, particularly the DINO family, can effectively detect temporomandibular joint osteoarthritis from cone-beam CT scans with 90.2% AUC when partially adapted. The study shows that strategic backbone unfreezing of final transformer blocks outperforms fully frozen models and supervised baselines, providing practical guidance for deploying foundation models in medical imaging with limited training data.