A New Technique for Diagnosis of Dental Caries on the Children’s First Permanent Molar

The current researches have been shown high prevalence and incidence of children's teeth caries, especially for the first permanent molar, which might do a lot of harm to their general health. Fortunately, early detection and protection can reduce the difficulty of treatment and protect children's oral health. However, traditional diagnostic methods such as dentist's visual inspection and radiographic imaging diagnosis are non-automatic and time-consuming. Given the COVID-19 epidemic, these methods should not be taken into consideration, since they fail to practice social distancing and further increase the risk of infection. To address these issues, in this paper we propose a novel caries detection and assessment (UCDA) framework to achieve a new technique for fully-automated diagnosis of dental caries on the children's first permanent molar. Inspired by an efficient in-network feature pyramid and anchor boxes, the proposed UCDA framework mainly contains a backbone network that is initialized with ResNet-FPN, and two parallel task-specific subnetworks for region regression and region classification. Due to the lack of the image database, we also present a novel children's oral image database, namely “Child-OID”, which comprises 1, 368 primary school children's oral images with standard diagnostic annotations and labels, to evaluate the effectiveness of our UCDA method. Experiments on the Child-OID database demonstrate that commonly occurring caries on the first permanent molar can be more accurately detected via the proposed UCDA framework. Database and code are available at https://github.com/GipinLinn/UCDA-and-Child-OID.git.