Use of Artificial Intelligence in the Diagnosis of Dental Caries: A Review Study

Background and aims: The term artificial intelligence refers to the ability of machines to thinklike humans. Machine learning and deep learning are branches of artificial intelligence that usestatistical methods to learn the relationship between data and return output with high accuracy.Dental caries is the most common disease related to oral health. Early and accurate diagnosis ofcaries and their treatment prevents more aggressive treatments. Therefore, the use of artificial intelligencecan help to increase the accuracy of detecting dental caries. The purpose of this reviewis to investigate the use of artificial intelligence in the diagnosis of dental caries.Method: This research is a review study based on PRISMA ۲۰۱۵ guidelines with advancedsearch in PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar search engine. Articles with thekeywords Artificial Intelligence, Dental Caries, Machine Learning, and Deep Learning were evaluatedbased on MeSh from ۲۰۱۳ to February ۲۰۲۳. After the initial search, two stages of screeningtook place; First, the title and abstract of the articles related to the objectives of the study wereexamined, and then the restriction of the English language and access to the full text was applied.Also, to ensure the completeness of the search results, the sources of the entered articles were alsochecked. The articles related to the research were evaluated with the JBI tool.Results: Studies show that the accuracy of artificial intelligence for detecting dental caries is highand their accuracy is the same as that of trained experts; Of course, in some studies, it was foundthat these systems can even surpass dentists in terms of performance. Artificial intelligence canhelp in mass surveillance of the population and improve the referral system. Artificial intelligencecan effectively detect caries that are overlooked by dentists’ eyes. Deep learning and machinelearning models improve the accuracy of diagnosis and increase clinical decision-making andtreatment prognosis. However, dental applications of AI models are still under development andtheir use in the clinic is rare due to limitations such as lack of reliable data and predeterminedcriteria.Conclusion: Artificial intelligence is introduced as a reliable tool to increase the accuracy ofdental caries diagnosis. Artificial intelligence can play an important role in helping dentists inthe diagnosis process and help in providing the best quality services to patients. Therefore, it isrecommended that more studies be done to solve the challenges and limitations of its use in theclinic.

کلیدواژه ها:

Artificial Intelligence ، Dental Caries ، Machine Learning ، Deep Learning