DentVLM: A Multimodal Vision-Language Model for Comprehensive Dental Diagnosis and Enhanced Clinical Practice

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This preprint introduces DentVLM, a multimodal vision-language model for comprehensive dental diagnosis, trained on a bilingual dataset of 110,447 images and 2.46 million visual question-answering pairs spanning seven 2D oral imaging modalities and 36 diagnostic tasks. DentVLM reportedly achieved higher accuracy than leading proprietary and open-source models for oral diseases (19.6%) and malocclusions (27.9%). In a clinical study with 25 dentists assessing 1,946 patients and 3,105 QA pairs, DentVLM outperformed junior dentists on 21 of 36 tasks and senior dentists on 12 of 36 tasks, and when integrated into a collaborative workflow it raised junior performance to senior levels while reducing diagnostic time by 15–22% for all practitioners. The authors note the work is a preprint and not peer reviewed. The paper does not explicitly discuss endometriosis or adenomyosis; it was included in the corpus via a keyword match in the upstream search index.

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Abstract

Abstract Diagnosing and managing oral diseases necessitate advanced visual interpretation across diverse imaging modalities and integrated information synthesis. While current AI models excel at isolated tasks, they often fall short in addressing the complex, multimodal requirements of comprehensive clinical dental practice. Here we introduce DentVLM, a multimodal vision-language model engineered for expert-level oral disease diagnosis. DentVLM was developed using a comprehensive, large-scale, bilingual dataset of 110,447 images and 2.46 million visual question-answering (VQA) pairs. The model is capable of interpreting seven 2D oral imaging modalities across 36 diagnostic tasks, significantly outperforming leading proprietary and open-source models by 19.6% higher accuracy for oral diseases and 27.9% for malocclusions. In a clinical study involving 25 dentists, evaluating 1,946 patients and encompassing 3,105 QA pairs, DentVLM surpassed the diagnostic performance of 13 junior dentists on 21 of 36 tasks and exceeded that of 12 senior dentists on 12 of 36 tasks. When integrated into a collaborative workflow, DentVLM elevated junior dentists’ performance to senior levels and reduced diagnostic time for all practitioners by 15-22%. Furthermore, DentVLM exhibited promising performance across three practical utility scenarios, including home-based dental health management, hospital-based intelligent diagnosis and multi-agent collaborative interaction. These findings establish DentVLM as a robust clinical decision support tool, poised to enhance primary dental care, mitigate provider-patient imbalances, and democratize access to specialized medical expertise within the field of dentistry.
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DentVLM: A Multimodal Vision-Language Model for Comprehensive Dental Diagnosis and Enhanced Clinical Practice | Research Square window.SnipcartSettings = { analytics: { enabled: false } }; (function() { var accessVector = localStorage.getItem('access_vector') || ''; window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || []; if (accessVector) { window.dataLayer.push({ user: { profile: { profileInfo: { snid: accessVector } } } }); } })(); (function(w,d,s,l,i){w[l]=w[l]||[];w[l].push({'gtm.start':new Date().getTime(),event:'gtm.js'});var f=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],j=d.createElement(s),dl=l!='dataLayer'?'&l='+l:'';j.async=true;j.src='https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtm.js?id='+i+dl;f.parentNode.insertBefore(j,f);})(window,document,'script','dataLayer','GTM-K279D39R'); Browse Preprints In Review Journals COVID-19 Preprints AJE Video Bytes Research Tools Research Promotion AJE Professional Editing AJE Rubriq About Preprint Platform In Review Editorial Policies Our Team Advisory Board Help Center Sign In Submit a Preprint Cite Share Download PDF Article DentVLM: A Multimodal Vision-Language Model for Comprehensive Dental Diagnosis and Enhanced Clinical Practice Zuozhu Liu, Zijie Meng, Jin Hao, Xiwei Dai, Yang Feng, Jiaxiang Liu, and 17 more This is a preprint; it has not been peer reviewed by a journal. https://doi.org/ 10.21203/rs.3.rs-7403627/v1 This work is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 License Status: Under Review Version 1 posted You are reading this latest preprint version Abstract Diagnosing and managing oral diseases necessitate advanced visual interpretation across diverse imaging modalities and integrated information synthesis. While current AI models excel at isolated tasks, they often fall short in addressing the complex, multimodal requirements of comprehensive clinical dental practice. Here we introduce DentVLM, a multimodal vision-language model engineered for expert-level oral disease diagnosis. DentVLM was developed using a comprehensive, large-scale, bilingual dataset of 110,447 images and 2.46 million visual question-answering (VQA) pairs. The model is capable of interpreting seven 2D oral imaging modalities across 36 diagnostic tasks, significantly outperforming leading proprietary and open-source models by 19.6% higher accuracy for oral diseases and 27.9% for malocclusions. In a clinical study involving 25 dentists, evaluating 1,946 patients and encompassing 3,105 QA pairs, DentVLM surpassed the diagnostic performance of 13 junior dentists on 21 of 36 tasks and exceeded that of 12 senior dentists on 12 of 36 tasks. When integrated into a collaborative workflow, DentVLM elevated junior dentists’ performance to senior levels and reduced diagnostic time for all practitioners by 15-22%. Furthermore, DentVLM exhibited promising performance across three practical utility scenarios, including home-based dental health management, hospital-based intelligent diagnosis and multi-agent collaborative interaction. These findings establish DentVLM as a robust clinical decision support tool, poised to enhance primary dental care, mitigate provider-patient imbalances, and democratize access to specialized medical expertise within the field of dentistry. Health sciences/Health care/Dentistry Health sciences/Diseases/Dental diseases Full Text Additional Declarations There is NO Competing Interest. Supplementary Files SupplementaryNotes.pdf Note1, ..., Note 5 SupplementaryTable.pdf Extended Table1, ..., Extented Table 14 DentVLMrepository.zip The repository for code review. Cite Share Download PDF Status: Under Review Version 1 posted You are reading this latest preprint version Research Square lets you share your work early, gain feedback from the community, and start making changes to your manuscript prior to peer review in a journal. As a division of Research Square Company, we’re committed to making research communication faster, fairer, and more useful. We do this by developing innovative software and high quality services for the global research community. Our growing team is made up of researchers and industry professionals working together to solve the most critical problems facing scientific publishing. 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