X-ray Image Analysis for Dental Disease: A Deep Learning Approach Using EfficientNets

Dental cavities are a highly common persistent dental problem that impacts populations across different age groups on a global scale. It is crucial to get a dental issue diagnosed as early as possible and with as much accuracy as possible to treat it efficiently and prevent any related issues. If a dental infection is not treated, it will eventually grow and cause tooth loss. Dental X-ray images are crucial and beneficial in the diagnostic process of dental diseases for dentists. By applying Deep Learning (DL) techniques to dental X-ray images, dental experts can efficiently and precisely detect dental conditions, including dental cavities, fillings and implants. The objective of this research is to assess the performance of DL-based methods for dental disease detection via panoramic radiographs. In this study, we evaluated the performance of all of the EfficientNet variants (e.g., EfficientNets B0-B7) to determine which one is the most effective model for detecting dental disease. Moreover, we utilized the Borderline Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE) to cope with the issue related to the minority classes contained in the dataset. To assess the efficacy of the model, various metrics are employed, including recall, accuracy, precision, loss, and F1-score. As a result, the performance of the EfficientNet-B5 model was superior to that of the other EfficientNet models. The EfficientNet-B5 model achieved the following values for its metrics: F1-score, accuracy, recall, AUC, and precision: 98.37%, 98.32%, 98.32%, 99.21%, and 98.32%, respectively. The accuracy rates for the EfficientNet-B0, EfficientNet-B1, EfficientNet-B2, EfficientNet-B3, EfficientNet-B4, EfficientNet-B6, and EfficientNet-B7, are 91.59%, 94.12%, 93.28%, 85.71%, 94.96%, 96.64% and 90.76%, respectively. The results indicated that the EfficientNet-B5 model performs better than other EfficientNet classifiers, which supports dental professionals significantly in the recognition of dental diseases.