A hybrid mask RCNN-based tool to localize dental cavities from real-time mixed photographic images

Nearly 3.5 billion humans have oral health issues, including dental caries, which requires dentist-patient exposure in oral examinations. The automated approaches identify and locate carious regions from dental images by localizing and processing either colored photographs or X-ray images taken via specialized dental photography cameras. The dentists’ interpretation of carious regions is difficult since the detected regions are masked using solid coloring and limited to a particular dental image type. The software-based automated tools to localize caries from dental images taken via ordinary cameras requires further investigation. This research provided a mixed dataset of dental photographic (colored or X-ray) images, instantiated a deep learning approach to enhance the existing dental image carious regions’ localization procedure, and implemented a full-fledged tool to present carious regions via simple dental images automatically. The instantiation mainly exploits the mixed dataset of dental images (colored photographs or X-rays) collected from multiple sources and pre-trained hybrid Mask RCNN to localize dental carious regions. The evaluations performed by the dentists showed that the correctness of annotated datasets is up to 96%, and the accuracy of the proposed system is between 78% and 92%. Moreover, the system achieved the overall satisfaction level of dentists above 80%.