An Automatic Tooth Position and Dental Disease Detection Algorithm Based on YOLOv8

With the development of digital dental imaging technology, panoramic tomographic images have become an effective tool for diagnosing dental diseases. However, due to the diversity and complexity of dental lesions, accurately identifying tooth positions and pathological conditions from these images remains challenging. To address the issue of low target detection accuracy caused by the high similarity and complex textures of teeth, this paper introduces YOLOv8-Teeth, an enhanced teeth detection algorithm designed for accurate identification of teeth positions and dental diseases from panoramic radiographs. Key innovations include integrating the C2f_ConvNeXtv2 module for improved feature extraction, employing the ASPP module for optimized multi-scale feature capture, and utilizing Focal-EloU Loss for refined bounding box regression. Experimental results on a custom dataset of 476 panoramic radiographs demonstrate significant performance gains, achieving a mean average precision (mAP) of 91.3%, precision of 93.6%, and recall of 88.7%. These improvements offer promising potential for early diagnosis and treatment planning in dental care.