ArchCaries-YOLO26: a dentition-aware framework for automated detection of primary and permanent tooth caries in intraoral photographs
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: To address the challenges of small lesion scales, irregular boundaries, substantial background interference, and similar local appearances between caries in primary and permanent teeth in color intraoral images, this paper proposes ArchCaries-YOLO26, a YOLO26-based object detection model for dental caries. Specifically, this study addresses the problem of accurately detecting and localizing carious lesions in intraoral photographs while distinguishing whether the detected lesions occur in primary or permanent teeth. The model introduces the Adaptive Dental-Arch Trajectory State-Space Module (ADT-SSM), which models the arrangement, scale, and morphological relationships of adjacent teeth through bidirectional state propagation along predicted dental-arch trajectories. Meanwhile, the Class-Conditioned Inner–Outer Boundary Integral Calibration module (CIBC) is designed to adaptively refine the bounding-box boundaries of caries in primary and permanent teeth by jointly analyzing the features of the inner candidate region, boundary ring, and outer dental tissue. On the public dataset, the proposed model achieves mAP @ 50 , mAP @ 50 - 95 , Precision, and Recall values of 0.951 ± 0.006 , 0.799 ± 0.007 , 0.918 ± 0.005 , and 0.872 ± 0.006 , respectively. On the clinical dataset, the corresponding metrics reach 0.920 ± 0.006 , 0.776 ± 0.007 , 0.779 ± 0.009 , and 0.905 ± 0.009 , respectively. The ablation results demonstrate that ADT-SSM and CIBC play complementary roles in dentition-context modeling and bounding-box localization, and their joint use achieves a more balanced performance in classification and localization. The proposed method provides a feasible technical approach for the automated screening of caries in primary and permanent teeth using conventional color intraoral images.
Source: Frontiers in Medicine
Authors: Zhenwei Guo, Shiqian Wu, Peipei Zhang, Di Xue, Zhuo Chen
Institution: Zhengzhou Central Hospital
Language: English
Subfield: Oral Surgery
Field: Dentistry
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $3,801
OpenAlex ID: W7221681861