Thankful Winter December

102 intraoral photos of primary teeth were marked to denote the plaque areas obtained by the AI model and the dentist to evaluate the diagnostic capacity of each approach based on lower-resolution photos. The mean intersection-over-union (MIoU) metric was employed to indicate detection accuracy. Results The MIoU for detecting plaque on the tested tooth photos was 0.726±0.165. The dentist’s MIoU was 0.695±0.269 when first diagnosing the 98 photos taken by the digital camera and 0.689±0.253 after 1 week. Compared to the dentist, the AI model demonstrated a higher MIoU (0.736±0.174), and the results did not change after 1 week. When the dentist and the AI model assessed the 102 intraoral photos, the MIoU was 0.652±0.195 for the dentist and 0.724±0.159 for the model. The results of a paired t-test found no significant difference between the AI model and human specialist (P> .05) in diagnosing dental plaque on primary teeth. Conclusions The AI model showed clinically acceptable performance in detecting dental plaque on primary teeth compared with an experienced pediatric dentist. This finding illustrates the potential of such AI technology to help improve pediatric oral health.