Early detection of dental caries has been one of the most predominant topics studied over the last few decades. Conventional examination through visual-tactile inspection and radiography can be inaccurate and destructive to teeth structure. The development of Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) has given dentistry an alternative diagnostic technique, which has been proven by numerous studies, that it has better sensitivity, specificity, and non-invasive characteristics. The growing popularity of Artificial Intelligence (AI) also contributes to a more efficient and effective way of image-based detection and decision-making. Previous studies, which have attempted to employ AI for caries assessment, did not incorporate high-quality data. Hence, they were unable to produce valid and reliable results. This study highlights the importance of high-quality data and aims to bypass this issue, by implementing an improved methodology to the automated detection and diagnosis of dental caries depending on AI. A two-phase study was carried out to explore different methods for caries detection. Initially OCT was verified, by surveying experienced clinicians, to be a better imaging technique compared to radiography. Then, our study showed that Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) in the scope of AI surpassed the accuracy of human clinicians. The data was preprocessed and labelled with the ground truth corresponding to Micro-CT with rigorous definition. Statistical analysis performed was mainly based on CohenâČs kappa coefficient. The results suggested that OCT (Îș = .611, SD = .107) showed a higher accuracy than radiography (Îș = .326, SD = .039) and CNNs (Îș = .835, SD = .057) were rated higher than clinicians (Îș = .538, SD = .131), both within a .05 significance. The best result was carried out by ResNet-152, concluding diagnostic accuracy to be 95.21% and sensitivity 98.85%. The improved methodology of this study hopes to pave the way for future studies in AI application in Dentistry.