Within the ever-growing healthcare industry, dental informatics is a burgeoning field of study. One of the major obstacles to the health care system’s transformation is obtaining knowledge and insightful data from complex, high-dimensional, and diverse sources. Modern biomedical research, for instance, has seen an increase in the use of complex, heterogeneous, poorly documented, and generally unstructured electronic health records, imaging, sensor data, and text. There were still certain restrictions even after many current techniques were used to extract more robust and useful elements from the data for analysis. New effective paradigms for building end-to-end learning models from complex data are provided by the most recent deep learning technology breakthroughs. Therefore, the current study aims to examine the most recent research on the use of deep learning techniques for dental informatics problems and recommend creating comprehensive and meaningful interpretable structures that might benefit the healthcare industry. We also draw attention to some drawbacks and the need for better technique development and provide new perspectives about this exciting new development in the field.

In image classification, multi-granularity refers to the ability to classify images with different levels of detail or resolution. This is a challenging task because the distinction between subcategories is often minimal, needing a high level of visual detail and precise representation of the features specific to each class. In dental informatics, and more specifically tooth classification poses many challenges due to overlapping teeth, varying sizes, shapes, and illumination levels. To address these issues, this paper considers various data granularity levels since a deeper level of details can be acquired with increased granularity. Three tooth granularity levels are considered in this study named Two Classes Granularity Level (2CGL), Four Classes Granularity Level (4CGL), and Seven Classes Granularity Level (7CGL) to analyze the performance of teeth detection and classification at multi-granularity levels in Granular Intra-Oral Image (GIOI) dataset. Subsequently, a Faster Region-Convolutional Neural Network (FR-CNN) based on three ResNet models is proposed for teeth detection and classification at multi-granularity levels from the GIOI dataset. The FR-CNN-ResNet models exploit the effect of the tooth classification granularity technique to empower the models with accurate features that lead to improved model performance. The results indicate a remarkable detection effect in investigating the granularity effect on the FR-CNN-ResNet model's performance. The FR-CNN-ResNet-50 model achieved 0.94 mAP for 2CGL, 0.74 mAP for 4CGL, and 0.69 mAP for 7CGL, respectively. The findings demonstrated that multi-granularity enables flexible and nuanced analysis of visual data, which can be useful in a wide range of applications.

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