CariesNet: a deep learning approach for segmentation of multi-stage caries lesion from oral panoramic X-ray image

Dental caries has been a common health issue throughout the world, which can even lead to dental pulp and root apical inflammation eventually. Timely and effective treatment of dental caries is vital for patients to reduce pain. Traditional caries disease diagnosis methods like naked-eye detection and panoramic radiograph examinations rely on experienced doctors, which may cause misdiagnosis and high time-consuming. To this end, we propose a novel deep learning architecture called CariesNet to delineate different caries degrees from panoramic radiographs. We firstly collect a high-quality panoramic radiograph dataset with 3127 well-delineated caries lesions, including shallow caries, moderate caries, and deep caries. Then we construct CariesNet as a U-shape network with the additional full-scale axial attention module to segment these three caries types from the oral panoramic images. Moreover, we test the segmentation performance between CariesNet and other baseline methods. Experiments show that our method can achieve a mean 93.64% Dice coefficient and 93.61% accuracy in the segmentation of three different levels of caries.