Tuberculosis (TB) is a contagious bacterial airborne disease, and is one of the top 10 causes of death worldwide. According to the World Health Organisation, around 1.8 billion people are infected with TB and 1.6 million deaths were reported in 2018. More importantly, 95% of cases and deaths were from developing countries. Yet, TB is a completely curable disease through early diagnosis. To achieve this goal one of the key requirements is efficient utilisation of existing diagnostic technologies, among which chest X-ray is the first line of diagnostic tool used for screening for active TB. The presented deep learning pipeline consists of three different modern deep learning architectures, to generate, segment, and classify lung X-rays. Apart from this, image preprocessing, image augmentation, genetic algorithm based hyper parameter tuning, and model ensembling were used to improve the diagnostic process. We were able to achieve classification accuracy of 97.1% (Youden’s index-0.941, sensitivity of 97.9%, specificity of 96.2%) which is a considerable improvement compared to the existing work in the literature. In our work, we present a highly accurate, automated TB screening system using chest X-rays, which would be helpful especially for low income countries with low access to qualified medical professionals.

Access to high-quality dental healthcare remains a challenge in many countries due to limited resources, lack of trained professionals, and time-consuming report generation tasks. An intelligent clinical decision support system (ICDSS), which can make informed decisions based on past data, is an innovative solution to address these shortcomings while improving continuous patient support in dental healthcare. This study proposes a viable solution with the aid of multimodal artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models (LLMs), focusing on their application for generating orthopantomography radiology reports and answering questions in the dental domain. This work also discusses efficient adaptation methods of LLMs for specific language and application domains. The proposed system primarily consists of a Blip-2-based caption generator tuned on DPT images followed by a Llama 3 8B based LLM for radiology report generation. The performance of the entire system is evaluated in two ways. The diagnostic performance of the system achieved an overall accuracy of 81.3%, with specific detection rates of 87.9% for dental caries, 89.7% for impacted teeth, 88% for bone loss, and 81.8% for periapical lesions. Subjective evaluation of AI-generated radiology reports by certified dental professionals demonstrates an overall accuracy score of 7.5 out of 10. In addition, the proposed solution includes a question-answering platform in the native Sinhala language, alongside the English language, designed to function as a chatbot for dental-related queries. We hope that this platform will eventually bridge the gap between dental services and patients, created due to a lack of human resources. Overall, our proposed solution creates new opportunities for LLMs in healthcare by introducing a robust end-to-end system for the automated generation of dental radiology reports and enhancing patient interaction and awareness.

Locating the Mental Foramen is a crucial aspect in Anesthetics. Inability of accurate locating of MF could lead to complications, therefore the use of a computer assisted techniques to accomplish this task is worth examining. The paper presents the successfulness of implementing a U-Net deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) for Dental Panoramic Tomography (DPT) images which was able to achieve mean dice coefficients of 98.7%.