ABSTRACT
PURPOSE: Dental health has been getting increased attention. Timely detection of non-normal teeth (caries, residual root, retainer, teeth filling, etc.) is of great importance for people's health, well-being, and quality of life. This work proposes a rapid detection of non-normal teeth based on improved Mask R-CNN, aiming to achieve comprehensive screening of non-normal teeth on dental X-ray images. METHODS: An improved Mask R-CNN based on attention mechanism was used to develop a non-normal teeth detection method trained on a high-quality annotated dataset, which can segment the whole mask of each non-normal tooth on the dental X-ray image immediately. RESULTS: The average precision (AP) of the proposed non-normal teeth detection was 0.795 with an intersection-over-union of 0.5 and max detections (maxDets) of 32, which was higher than that of the typical Mask R-CNN method (AP = 0.750). In addition, validation experiments showed that the evaluation metrics (AP, recall, precision-recall (P-R) curve) of the proposed method were superior to those of the Mask R-CNN method. Furthermore, the experimental results indicated that proposed method exhibited a high sensitivity (95.65%) in detecting secondary caries. The proposed method took about 0.12 s to segment non-normal teeth on one dental X-ray image using the laptop (8G memory, NVIDIA RTX 3060 graphics processing unit), which was much faster than conventional manual methods. CONCLUSION: The proposed method enhances the accuracy and efficiency of abnormal tooth diagnosis for practitioners, while also facilitating early detection and treatment of dental caries to substantially lower patient costs. Additionally, it can enable rapid and objective evaluation of student performance in dental examinations.