Precise dental caries segmentation in X-rays with an attention and edge dual-decoder network

Caries segmentation holds significant clinical importance in medical image analysis, particularly in the early detection and treatment of dental caries. However, existing deep learning segmentation methods often struggle with accurately segmenting complex caries boundaries. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a novel network, named AEDD-Net, which combines an attention mechanism with a dual-decoder structure to enhance the performance of boundary segmentation for caries. Unlike traditional methods, AEDD-Net integrates atrous spatial pyramid pooling with cross-coordinate attention mechanisms to effectively fuse global and multi-scale features. Additionally, the network introduces a dedicated boundary generation module that precisely extracts caries boundary information. Moreover, we propose an innovative boundary loss function to further improve the learning of boundary features. Experimental results demonstrate that AEDD-Net significantly outperforms other comparison networks in terms of Dice coefficient, Jaccard similarity, precision, and sensitivity, particularly showing superior performance in boundary segmentation. This study provides an innovative approach for automated caries segmentation, with promising potential for clinical applications.