Artificial intelligence enabled smart phone app for real-time caries detection on bitewing radiographs

Diagnosis of proximal caries is a difficult task. Artificial intelligence (AI) enabled diagnosis is gaining momentum. Therefore, it is of interest to evaluate the effectiveness of an artificial intelligence (AI) smart phone application for bitewing radiography towards real-time caries lesion detection. The Efficient Det-Lite1 artificial neural network was used after training 100 radiographic images obtained from the department of Oral Medicine. Trained model was then installed in a Google Pixel 6 (GP6) smartphone as artificial intelligence app. The back-facing mobile phone video camera of GP6 was utilised to detect caries lesions on 100 bitewing radiographs (BWR) with 80 carious lesion in real-time. Two different techniques such as scanning the static BWR on laptop with a moving mobile and scanning the moving radiograph on the laptop with stationery mobile were used. The average value of sensitivity/precision/F1 scores for both the techniques was 0.75/0.846 and 0.795 respectively. AI programme using the rear-facing mobile phone video camera was found to detect 75% of caries lesions in real time on 100 BWR with a precision of 84.6%. Thus, the use of AI with smart phone app is useful for caries diagnosis which is readily accessible, easy to use and fast.