Artificial intelligence based on Convolutional Neural Network for detecting dental caries on bitewing and periapical radiographs

Abstract

Objectives: This narrative review is written to describe the accuracy of caries detection and find out the clinical implications and future prospects of using Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to determine radio-diagnosis of dental caries in bitewing and periapical radiographs. Review: The databases used for literature searching in this narrative review were PubMed, Google Scholar, and Science Direct. The inclusion criteria were original article, case report, and textbook written in English and Bahasa Indonesia, published within 2011-2021. The exclusion criteria were articles that the full text could not be accessed, research article that did not provide the methods used, and duplication articles. In this narrative review, a total of 33 literatures consisting of 30 articles and three textbooks reviewed, including four original articles on CNN for caries detection. Conclusion: Results of the review reveal that GoogLeNet produces the best detection compared to Fully Convolutional Network (FCN) and U-Net for caries detection in bitewing and periapical radiographs. Nonetheless, the positive predictive value (PPV), recall, negative predictive value (NPV), specificity, F1-score, and accuracy values in these architectures indicate good performance. The differences of each CNN’s performances to detect caries are determined by the number of trained datasets, the architecture’s layers, and the complexity of the CNN architectures. The conclusion of this review is CNN can be used as an alternative to detect caries, increasing the diagnostic accuracy and time efficiency as well as preventing errors due to dentist fatigue. Yet the CNN is not able to substitute the expertise of a radiologist. Therefore, it is need to be revalidated by the radiologist to avoid diagnostic errors.