Background: Dental caries diagnosis requires the manual inspection of diagnostic bitewing images of the patient, followed by a visual inspection and probing of the identified dental pieces with potential lesions. Yet the use of artificial intelligence, and in particular deep-learning, has the potential to aid in the diagnosis by providing a quick and informative analysis of the bitewing images. Methods: A dataset of 13,887 bitewings from the HUNT4 Oral Health Study were annotated individually by six different experts, and used to train three different object detection deep-learning architectures: RetinaNet (ResNet50), YOLOv5 (M size), and EfficientDet (D0 and D1 sizes). A consensus dataset of 197 images, annotated jointly by the same six dentist, was used for evaluation. A five-fold cross validation scheme was used to evaluate the performance of the AI models. Results: he trained models show an increase in average precision and F1-score, and decrease of false negative rate, with respect to the dental clinicians. When compared against the dental clinicians, the YOLOv5 model shows the largest improvement, reporting 0.647 mean average precision, 0.548 mean F1-score, and 0.149 mean false negative rate. Whereas the best annotators on each of these metrics reported 0.299, 0.495, and 0.164 respectively. Conclusion: Deep-learning models have shown the potential to assist dental professionals in the diagnosis of caries. Yet, the task remains challenging due to the artifacts natural to the bitewing images.
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