Caries segmentation on tooth X-ray images with a deep network

Deep learning has been a promising technology in many biomedical applications. In this study, a deep network was proposed aiming for caries segmentation on the clinically collected tooth X-ray images.The proposed network inherited the skip connection characteristic from the widely used U-shaped network, and creatively adopted vision Transformer, dilated convolution, and feature pyramid fusion methods to enhance the multi-scale and global feature extraction capability. It was then trained on the clinically self-collected and augmented tooth X-ray image dataset, and the dice similarity and pixel classification precision were calculated for the network's performance evaluation.Experimental results revealed an average dice similarity of 0.7487 and an average pixel classification precision of 0.7443 on the test dataset, which outperformed the compared networks such as UNet, Trans-UNet, and Swin-UNet, demonstrating the remarkable improvement of the proposed network.This study contributed to the automatic caries segmentation by using a deep network, and highlighted the potential clinical utility value.