Caries segmentation on tooth X-ray images with a deep network
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Updated: Oct 2, 2025

Application of Deep Learning-Based Medical Image Segmentation via Orbital Computed Tomography
Published on: November 30, 2022
Shunv Ying1, Benwu Wang2, Haihua Zhu1
1Stomatology Hospital, School of Stomatology, Zhejiang University School of Medicine, Clinical Research Center for Oral Diseases of Zhejiang Province, Key Laboratory of Oral Biomedical Research of Zhejiang Province, Cancer Center of Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310006, China.
Objectives:
Deep learning has been a promising technology in many biomedical applications. In this study, a deep network was proposed aiming for caries segmentation on the clinically collected tooth X-ray images.
Methods:
The proposed network inherited the skip connection characteristic from the widely used U-shaped network, and creatively adopted vision Transformer, dilated convolution, and feature pyramid fusion methods to enhance the multi-scale and global feature extraction capability. It was then trained on the clinically self-collected and augmented tooth X-ray image dataset, and the dice similarity and pixel classification precision were calculated for the network's performance evaluation.
Results:
Experimental results revealed an average dice similarity of 0.7487 and an average pixel classification precision of 0.7443 on the test dataset, which outperformed the compared networks such as UNet, Trans-UNet, and Swin-UNet, demonstrating the remarkable improvement of the proposed network.
Conclusions:
This study contributed to the automatic caries segmentation by using a deep network, and highlighted the potential clinical utility value.
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