In the field of dentistry, the presence of dental calculus is a commonly encountered issue. If not addressed promptly, it has the potential to lead to gum inflammation and eventual tooth loss. Bitewing (BW) images play a crucial role by providing a comprehensive visual representation of the tooth structure, allowing dentists to examine hard-to-reach areas with precision during clinical assessments. This visual aid significantly aids in the early detection of calculus, facilitating timely interventions and improving overall outcomes for patients. This study introduces a system designed for the detection of dental calculus in BW images, leveraging the power of YOLOv8 to identify individual teeth accurately. This system boasts an impressive precision rate of 97.48%, a recall (sensitivity) of 96.81%, and a specificity rate of 98.25%. Furthermore, this study introduces a novel approach to enhancing interdental edges through an advanced image-enhancement algorithm. This algorithm combines the use of a median filter and bilateral filter to refine the accuracy of convolutional neural networks in classifying dental calculus. Before image enhancement, the accuracy achieved using GoogLeNet stands at 75.00%, which significantly improves to 96.11% post-enhancement. These results hold the potential for streamlining dental consultations, enhancing the overall efficiency of dental services.

An apical lesion is caused by bacteria invading the tooth apex through caries. Periodontal disease is caused by plaque accumulation. Peri-endo combined lesions include both diseases and significantly affect dental prognosis. The lack of clear symptoms in the early stages of onset makes diagnosis challenging, and delayed treatment can lead to the spread of symptoms. Early infection detection is crucial for preventing complications. PAs used as the database were provided by Chang Gung Memorial Medical Center, Taoyuan, Taiwan, with permission from the Institutional Review Board (IRB): 02002030B0. The tooth apex image enhancement method is a new technology in PA detection. This image enhancement method is used with convolutional neural networks (CNN) to classify apical lesions, peri-endo combined lesions, and asymptomatic cases, and to compare with You Only Look Once-v8-Oriented Bounding Box (YOLOv8-OBB) disease detection results. The contributions lie in the utilization of database augmentation and adaptive histogram equalization on individual tooth images, achieving the highest comprehensive validation accuracy of 95.23% with the ConvNextv2 model. Furthermore, the CNN outperformed YOLOv8 in identifying apical lesions, achieving an F1-Score of 92.45%. For the classification of peri-endo combined lesions, CNN attained the highest F1-Score of 96.49%, whereas YOLOv8 scored 88.49%.

The severity of periodontitis can be analyzed by calculating the loss of alveolar crest (ALC) level and the level of bone loss between the tooth’s bone and the cemento-enamel junction (CEJ). However, dentists need to manually mark symptoms on periapical radiographs (PAs) to assess bone loss, a process that is both time-consuming and prone to errors. This study proposes the following new method that contributes to the evaluation of disease and reduces errors. Firstly, innovative periodontitis image enhancement methods are employed to improve PA image quality. Subsequently, single teeth can be accurately extracted from PA images by object detection with a maximum accuracy of 97.01%. An instance segmentation developed in this study accurately extracts regions of interest, enabling the generation of masks for tooth bone and tooth crown with accuracies of 93.48% and 96.95%. Finally, a novel detection algorithm is proposed to automatically mark the CEJ and ALC of symptomatic teeth, facilitating faster accurate assessment of bone loss severity by dentists. The PA image database used in this study, with the IRB number 02002030B0 provided by Chang Gung Medical Center, Taiwan, significantly reduces the time required for dental diagnosis and enhances healthcare quality through the techniques developed in this research.

Background and Objectives: Implant brand identification is critical in modern dental clinical diagnostics. With the increasing variety of implant brands and the difficulty of accurate identification in periapical radiographs, there is a growing demand for automated solutions. This study aims to leverage deep learning techniques to assist in dental implant classification, providing dentists with an efficient and reliable tool for implant brand detection. Methods: We proposed an innovative implant brand feature extraction method with multiple image enhancement techniques to improve implant visibility and classification accuracy. Additionally, we introduced a PA resolution enhancement technique that utilizes Dark Channel Prior and Lanczos interpolation for image resolution upscaling. Results: We evaluated the performance differences among various YOLO models for implant brand detection. Additionally, we analyzed the impact of implant brand feature extraction and PA resolution enhancement techniques on YOLO’s detection accuracy. Our results show that IB-YOLOv10 achieves a 17.8% accuracy improvement when incorporating these enhancement techniques compared to IB-YOLOv10 without enhancements. In real-world clinical applications, IB-YOLOv10 can classify implant brands in just 6.47 ms per PA, significantly reducing diagnostic time. Compared to existing studies, our model improves implant detection accuracy by 2.3%, achieving an overall classification accuracy of 94.5%. Conclusions: The findings of this study demonstrate that IB-YOLOv10 effectively reduces the diagnostic burden on dentists while providing a fast and reliable implant brand detection solution, improves clinical efficiency, and establishes a robust deep learning approach for automated implant detection in PA.

Odontogenic sinusitis is a type of sinusitis caused by apical lesions of teeth near the maxillary sinus floor. Its clinical symptoms are highly like other types of sinusitis, often leading to misdiagnosis as general sinusitis by dentists in the early stages. This misdiagnosis delays treatment and may be accompanied by toothache. Therefore, using artificial intelligence to assist dentists in accurately diagnosing odontogenic sinusitis is crucial. This study introduces an innovative odontogenic sinusitis image processing technique, which is fused with common contrast limited adaptive histogram equalization, Min-Max normalization, and the RGB mapping method. Moreover, this study combined various deep learning models to enhance diagnostic accuracy. The YOLO 11n model was used to detect odontogenic sinusitis single tooth position in dental panoramic radiographs and achieved an accuracy of 98.2%. The YOLOv8n-cls model diagnosed odontogenic sinusitis with a final classification accuracy of 96.1%, achieving a 16.9% improvement over non-enhanced methods and outperforming recent studies by at least 4%. Additionally, in clinical applications, the classification accuracy for non-odontogenic sinusitis was 95.8%, while for odontogenic sinusitis it was 97.6%. The detection method developed in this study effectively reduces the radiation dose patients receive during CT imaging and serves as an auxiliary system, providing dentists with reliable support for the precise diagnosis of odontogenic sinusitis.