Deep-Learning AI-Model for Predicting Dental Plaque in the Young Permanent Teeth of Children Aged 8-13 Years

Abstract

Background/Objectives: Dental plaque is a significant contributor to various prevalent oral health conditions, including caries, gingivitis, and periodontitis. Consequently, its detection and management are of paramount importance for maintaining oral health. Manual plaque assessment is time-consuming, error-prone, and particularly challenging in uncooperative pediatric patients. These limitations have encouraged researchers to seek faster, more reliable methods. Accordingly, this study aims to develop a deep learning model for detecting and segmenting plaque in young permanent teeth and to evaluate its diagnostic precision. Methods: The dataset comprises 506 dental images from 31 patients aged between 8 and 13 years. Six state-of-the-art models were trained and evaluated using this dataset. The U-Net Transformer model, which yielded the best performance, was further compared against three experienced pediatric dentists for clinical feasibility using 35 randomly selected images from the test set. The clinical trial was registered on under the ID NCT06603233 (1 June 2023). Results: The Intersection over Union (IoU) score of the U-Net Transformer on the test set was measured as 0.7845, and the p-values obtained from the three t-tests conducted for comparison with dentists were found to be below 0.05. Compared with three experienced pediatric dentists, the deep learning model exhibited clinically superior performance in the detection and segmentation of dental plaque in young permanent teeth. Conclusions: This finding highlights the potential of AI-driven technologies in enhancing the accuracy and reliability of dental plaque detection and segmentation in pediatric dentistry.