Oral screening of dental calculus, gingivitis and dental caries through segmentation on intraoral photographic images using deep learning.

OBJECTIVE

Intraoral photographic images are instrumental in the early screening and clinical diagnosis of oral diseases. In addition, people have been trying to apply artificial intelligence to these images. The purpose of this study is to investigate and evaluate a deep learning system designed to segment intraoral photographic images for the detection of dental caries, dental calculus, and gingivitis, and to assess the degree of dental calculus based on the overall features of the tooth surface and gingival margin.

MATERIAL AND METHODS

This cross-sectional study collected 3,365 oral endoscopic images, randomly distributed in training datasets (2,019 images), validation dataset (673 images), and test dataset (673 images). The training set and verification set images are manually labeled. An oral endoscopic image segmentation method based on Mamba (Oral-Mamba) and an intelligent evaluation model of dental calculus degree were proposed, achieving the segmentation of two types of oral diseases, namely gingivitis and dental caries, as well as the segmentation of dental calculus regions, and the intelligent evaluation of the degree of dental calculus.

RESULTS

Oral-Mamba demonstrated high accuracy in segmentation, with accuracy rates for gingivitis, dental caries, and dental calculus at 0.83, 0.83, and 0.81, respectively. In particular, these rates surpassed those of the U-Net model in IoU, accuracy, and recall metrics. Furthermore, Oral-Mamba runs 25% faster than U-Net.The accuracy of degree classification in the intelligent evaluation model of dental calculus degree is 85%.

CONCLUSION

The proposed deep learning system is expected to be used for the detection of two types of oral diseases and dental calculus, and the degree judgment of photographic images from an intraoral camera. This system offers a practical method to assist in the oral screening of dental caries, dental calculus, and gingivitis, providing benefits such as intuitive use, time efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and ease of deployment.