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Record W4409249366 · doi:10.1371/journal.pdig.0000816

Deep learning-based assessment of pulp involvement in primary molars using YOLO v8

2025· article· en· W4409249366 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.
fundA Canadian funder is recorded on the work.
aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.

Bibliographic record

VenuePLOS Digital Health · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldDentistry
TopicDental Radiography and Imaging
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Alberta
FundersUniversity of Alberta
KeywordsMolarMedicineDentistryPulp (tooth)Medical diagnosisOrthodontics

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Dental caries is a major global public health problem, especially among young children. Rapid decay progression often necessitates pulp treatment, making accurate pulp condition assessment crucial. Despite advances in pulp management techniques, diagnostic methods for assessing pulp involvement have not significantly improved. This study aimed to develop a machine learning (ML) model to diagnose pulp involvement using radiographs of carious primary molars. Clinical charts and bitewing radiographs of 900 children treated from 2018-2022 at the University of Alberta dental clinic were reviewed, yielding a sample of 482 teeth. images were preprocessed, standardized, and labeled based on clinical diagnoses. Data were split into training, validation, and test sets, with data augmentation applied to classify 2 categories of outcomes. The YOLOv8m-cls model architecture included convolutional and classification layers, and performance was evaluated using top-1 and top-5 accuracy metrics. The YOLOv8m-cls model achieved a top-1 accuracy of 78.7% for upper primary molars and 87.8% for lower primary molars. Validation datasets showed higher accuracy for lower primary teeth. Performance on new test images demonstrated precision, recall, accuracy, and F1-scores, highlighting the model's effectiveness in diagnosing pulp involvement, with lower primary molars showing superior results. This study developed a promising CNN model for diagnosing pulp involvement in primary teeth using bitewing radiographs, showing promise for clinical application in pediatric dentistry. Future research should explore whole bitewing images, include clinical variables, and integrate heat maps to enhance the model. This tool could streamline clinical practice, improve informed consent, and assist in dental student training.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: Observational
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.099
Threshold uncertainty score0.736

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.023
GPT teacher head0.319
Teacher spread0.295 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it