DA-Net: A classification-guided network for dental anomaly detection from dental and maxillofacial images

Dental abnormalities (DA) are frequent signs of disorders of the mouth that cause discomfort, infection, and loss of teeth. Early and reasonably priced treatment may be possible if defective teeth in the oral cavity are automatically detected. Several research works have endeavored to create a potent deep learning model capable of identifying DA from pictures. However, because of the following problems, aberrant teeth from the oral cavity are difficult to detect: 1) Normal teeth and crowded dentition frequently overlap; 2) The lesion area on the tooth surface is tiny. This paper proposes a professional dental anomaly detection network (DA-Net) to address such issues. First, a multi-scale dense connection module (MSDC) is designed to distinguish crowded teeth from normal teeth by learning multi-scale spatial information of dentition. Then, a pixel differential convolution (PDC) module is designed to perform pathological tooth recognition by extracting small lesion features. Finally, a multi-stage convolutional attention module (MSCA) is developed to integrate spatial information and channel information to obtain abnormal teeth in small areas. Experiments on benchmarks show that DA-Net performs well in dental anomaly detection and can further assist doctors in making treatment plans. Specifically, the DA-Net method performs best on multiple detection evaluation metrics: IoU, PRE, REC, and mAP. In terms of REC and mAP indicators, the proposed DA-Net method is 1.1% and 1.3% higher than the second-ranked YOLOv7 method.