Evaluations of dental vision-language models remain fragmented across datasets, task definitions and metrics, and often ignore their computational cost. This limits their widespread deployment for dental screening outside specialist centres, where timely inference, limited hardware, and local handling of patient images are vital for practical, privacy-preserving clinical prescreening. Here we present Pocket-Dentist, an efficiency-aware benchmark for dental multimodal question answering that brings together three datasets spanning approximately 1,159 patients from BRAR and MetaDent, five task types and seven metrics. Across 14 typical VLMs, our results reveal an interesting observation: compact VLMs, such as 2B-parameter models, become competitive with much larger VLMs on most metrics after lightweight adaptation while requiring substantially lower computational costs in dental image understanding. Deployed locally on an iPhone 17 Pro, our finetuned compact VLM Pocket-Dentist-2B processed each sample in 4.31 s, reducing latency by 4.9x and memory use by 2.3x compared with a 7B baseline. Our project page is available at https://2026-icml.github.io/pocket-dentist-icml.
Mixed Reality (MR) is proven in the literature to support precise spatial dental drill positioning by superimposing 3D widgets. Despite this, the related knowledge about widget's visual design and interactive user feedback is still limited. Therefore, this study is contributed to by co-designed MR drill tool positioning widgets with two expert dentists and three MR experts. The results of co-design are two static widgets (SWs): a simple entry point, a target axis, and two dynamic widgets (DWs), variants of dynamic error visualization with and without a target axis (DWTA and DWEP). We evaluated the co-designed widgets in a virtual reality simulation supported by a realistic setup with a tracked phantom patient, a virtual magnifying loupe, and a dentist's foot pedal. The user study involved 35 dentists with various backgrounds and years of experience. The findings demonstrated significant results; DWs outperform SWs in positional and rotational precision, especially with younger generations and subjects with gaming experiences. The user preference remains for DWs (19) instead of SWs (16). However, findings indicated that the precision positively correlates with the time trade-off. Th
Existing benchmarks evaluating biases in large language models (LLMs) primarily rely on explicit cues, declaring protected attributes like religion, race, gender by name. However, real-world interactions often contain implicit biases, inferred subtly through names, cultural cues, or traits. This critical oversight creates a significant blind spot in fairness evaluation. We introduce ImplicitBBQ, a benchmark extending the Bias Benchmark for QA (BBQ) with implicitly cued protected attributes across 6 categories. Our evaluation of GPT-4o on ImplicitBBQ illustrates troubling performance disparity from explicit BBQ prompts, with accuracy declining up to 7% in the "sexual orientation" subcategory and consistent decline located across most other categories. This indicates that current LLMs contain implicit biases undetected by explicit benchmarks. ImplicitBBQ offers a crucial tool for nuanced fairness evaluation in NLP.
A natural way of quantifying the ``amount of information'' in decision problems yields a globally concave value for information. Another (in contrast, adversarial) way almost never does.
3D and 4D printing are cutting-edge technologies for precise and expedited manufacturing of objects ranging from plastic to metal. Recent advances in 3D and 4D printing technologies in dentistry and maxillofacial surgery enable dentists to custom design and print surgical drill guides, temporary and permanent crowns and bridges, orthodontic appliances and orthotics, implants, mouthguards for drug delivery. In the present review, different 3D printing technologies available for use in dentistry are highlighted together with a critique on the materials available for printing. Recent reports of the application of these printed platformed are highlighted to enable readers appreciate the progress in 3D/4D printing in dentistry.
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 diagnosti
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have exhibited immense potential across numerous medical specialties; yet, dentistry remains underexplored, in part due to limited domain-specific data, scarce dental expert annotations, insufficient modality-specific modeling, and challenges in reliability. In this paper, we present OralGPT-Omni, the first dental-specialized MLLM designed for comprehensive and trustworthy analysis across diverse dental imaging modalities and clinical tasks. To explicitly capture dentists' diagnostic reasoning, we construct TRACE-CoT, a clinically grounded chain-of-thought dataset that mirrors dental radiologists' decision-making processes. This reasoning supervision, combined with our proposed four-stage training paradigm, substantially strengthens the model's capacity for dental image understanding and analysis. In parallel, we introduce MMOral-Uni, the first unified multimodal benchmark for dental image analysis. It comprises 2,809 open-ended question-answer pairs spanning five modalities and five tasks, offering a comprehensive evaluation suite to date for MLLMs in digital dentistry. OralGPT-Omni achieves an overall score of 51.84 on the MMOral-Uni bench
Dental triage is a safety-critical clinical routing task that requires integrating multimodal clinical information (e.g., patient complaints and radiographic evidence) to determine complete referral plans. We present Dental-TriageBench, the first expert-annotated benchmark for reasoning-driven multimodal dental triage. Built from authentic outpatient workflows, it contains 246 de-identified cases annotated with expert-authored golden reasoning trajectories, together with hierarchical triage labels. We benchmark 19 proprietary, open-source, and medical-domain MLLMs against three junior dentists serving as the human baseline, and find a substantial human--model gap, on fine-grained treatment-level triage. Further analyses show that accurate triage requires both complaint and OPG information, and that model errors concentrate on cases with multiple referral domains, where MLLMs tend to produce overly narrow referral sets and omission-heavy errors. Dental-TriageBench provides a realistic testbed for developing multimodal clinical AI systems that are more clinically grounded, coverage-aware, and safer for downstream care.
Large language models (LLMs) hold transformative potential in healthcare, yet their capacity to interpret longitudinal patient narratives remains inadequately explored. Dentistry, with its rich repository of structured clinical data, presents a unique opportunity to rigorously assess LLMs' reasoning abilities. While several commercial LLMs already exist, DeepSeek, a model that gained significant attention earlier this year, has also joined the competition. This study evaluated four state-of-the-art LLMs (GPT-4o, Gemini 2.0 Flash, Copilot, and DeepSeek V3) on their ability to analyze longitudinal dental case vignettes through open-ended clinical tasks. Using 34 standardized longitudinal periodontal cases (comprising 258 question-answer pairs), we assessed model performance via automated metrics and blinded evaluations by licensed dentists. DeepSeek emerged as the top performer, demonstrating superior faithfulness (median score = 0.528 vs. 0.367-0.457) and higher expert ratings (median = 4.5/5 vs. 4.0/5), without significantly compromising readability. Our study positions DeepSeek as the leading LLM for case analysis, endorses its integration as an adjunct tool in both medical educat
Dental implant abutments serve as the geometric and biomechanical interface between the implant fixture and the prosthetic crown, yet their design relies heavily on manual effort and is time-consuming. Although deep neural networks have been proposed to assist dentists in designing abutments, most existing approaches remain largely manual or semi-automated, requiring substantial clinician intervention and lacking scalability in multi-abutment scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose TEMAD, a fully automated, text-conditioned multi-expert architecture for multi-abutment design. This framework integrates implant site localization and implant system, compatible abutment parameter regression into a unified pipeline. Specifically, we introduce an Implant Site Identification Network (ISIN) to automatically localize implant sites and provide this information to the subsequent multi-abutment regression network. We further design a Tooth-Conditioned Feature-wise Linear Modulation (TC-FiLM) module, which adaptively calibrates mesh representations using tooth embeddings to enable position-specific feature modulation. Additionally, a System-Prompted Mixture-of-Experts (SPMoE) mechan
Malocclusion is a major challenge in orthodontics, and its complex presentation and diverse clinical manifestations make accurate localization and diagnosis particularly important. Currently, one of the major shortcomings facing the field of dental image analysis is the lack of large-scale, accurately labeled datasets dedicated to malocclusion issues, which limits the development of automated diagnostics in the field of dentistry and leads to a lack of diagnostic accuracy and efficiency in clinical practice. Therefore, in this study, we propose the Oral and Maxillofacial Natural Images (OMNI) dataset, a novel and comprehensive dental image dataset aimed at advancing the study of analyzing dental images for issues of malocclusion. Specifically, the dataset contains 4166 multi-view images with 384 participants in data collection and annotated by professional dentists. In addition, we performed a comprehensive validation of the created OMNI dataset, including three CNN-based methods, two Transformer-based methods, and one GNN-based method, and conducted automated diagnostic experiments for malocclusion issues. The experimental results show that the OMNI dataset can facilitate the auto
Accurate detection of anatomic landmarks is essential for assessing alveolar bone and root conditions, thereby optimizing clinical outcomes in orthodontics, periodontics, and implant dentistry. Manual annotation of landmarks on cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT) by dentists is time-consuming, labor-intensive, and subject to inter-observer variability. Deep learning-based automated methods present a promising approach to streamline this process efficiently. However, the scarcity of training data and the high cost of expert annotations hinder the adoption of conventional deep learning techniques. To overcome these challenges, we introduce GeoSapiens, a novel few-shot learning framework designed for robust dental landmark detection using limited annotated CBCT of anterior teeth. Our GeoSapiens framework comprises two key components: (1) a robust baseline adapted from Sapiens, a foundational model that has achieved state-of-the-art performance in human-centric vision tasks, and (2) a novel geometric loss function that improves the model's capacity to capture critical geometric relationships among anatomical structures. Experiments conducted on our collected dataset of anterior teeth
A healthy smile plays a significant role in functional as well as esthetic considerations, improving confidence. It is difficult for dental professionals to strike a balance between esthetic requirements and functional requirements. Traditional smile design has had heavy reliance on dentist expertise and used plaster models and hand drawings, raising questions about the outcome for patients. Digital technology, led by Dr. Christian Coachman in 2007, allows photographic and videographic assessments, enabling improved intercommunication among specialists and patients. Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and big data have supported analysis of facial features and development of personalized smile designs in the last few years. Outputs are, however, susceptible to practitioner bias or limitations of training data, and may be suboptimal for individual users. The study presented here suggests a comprehensive system integrating AI, big data, and recognition technologies to automate the smile design process so that both experienced and inexperienced dentists can generate pleasing aesthetics with ease. The system has a Facial Feature Extraction Module and an Image Generation Module, se
Digital crown design remains a labor-intensive bottleneck in restorative dentistry. We present CrownGen, a generative framework that automates patient-customized crown design using a denoising diffusion model on a novel tooth-level point cloud representation. The system employs two core components: a boundary prediction module to establish spatial priors and a diffusion-based generative module to synthesize high-fidelity morphology for multiple teeth in a single inference pass. We validated CrownGen through a quantitative benchmark on 496 external scans and a clinical study of 26 restoration cases. Results demonstrate that CrownGen surpasses state-of-the-art models in geometric fidelity and significantly reduces active design time. Clinical assessments by trained dentists confirmed that CrownGen-assisted crowns are statistically non-inferior in quality to those produced by expert technicians using manual workflows. By automating complex prosthetic modeling, CrownGen offers a scalable solution to lower costs, shorten turnaround times, and enhance patient access to high-quality dental care.
Dental anxiety is prevalent among children, often leading to missed treatment and potential negative effects on their mental well-being. While several interventions (e.g., pharmacological and psychotherapeutic techniques) have been introduced for anxiety alleviation, the recently emerged virtual reality (VR) technology, with its immersive and playful nature, opened new opportunities for complementing and enhancing the therapeutic effects of existing interventions. In this light, we conducted a series of co-design workshops with 13 children aged 10-12 to explore how they envisioned using VR to address their fear and stress associated with dental visits, followed by interviews with parents (n = 13) and two dentists. Our findings revealed that children expected VR to provide immediate relief, social support, and a sense of control during dental treatment, parents sought educational opportunities for their children to learn about oral health, and dentists prioritized treatment efficiency and safety issues. Drawing from the findings, we discuss the considerations of multi-stakeholders for developing VR-assisted anxiety management applications for children within and beyond dental settin
Hallucination is a common problem for Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) with long generations which is difficult to eradicate. The generation with hallucinations is partially inconsistent with the image content. To mitigate hallucination, current studies either focus on the process of model inference or the results of model generation, but the solutions they design sometimes do not deal appropriately with various types of queries and the hallucinations of the generations about these queries. To accurately deal with various hallucinations, we present a unified framework, Dentist, for hallucination mitigation. The core step is to first classify the queries, then perform different processes of hallucination mitigation based on the classification result, just like a dentist first observes the teeth and then makes a plan. In a simple deployment, Dentist can classify queries as perception or reasoning and easily mitigate potential hallucinations in answers which has been demonstrated in our experiments. On MMbench, we achieve a 13.44%/10.2%/15.8% improvement in accuracy on Image Quality, a Coarse Perception visual question answering (VQA) task, over the baseline InstructBLIP/LLaVA/Vis
Vision language models (VLMs), such as CLIP and OpenCLIP, can encode and reflect stereotypical associations between medical professions and demographic attributes learned from web-scale data. We present an evaluation protocol for healthcare settings that quantifies associated biases and assesses their operational risk. Our methodology (i) defines a taxonomy spanning clinicians and allied healthcare roles (e.g., surgeon, cardiologist, dentist, nurse, pharmacist, technician), (ii) curates a profession-aware prompt suite to probe model behavior, and (iii) benchmarks demographic skew against a balanced face corpus. Empirically, we observe consistent demographic biases across multiple roles and vision models. Our work highlights the importance of bias identification in critical domains such as healthcare as AI-enabled hiring and workforce analytics can have downstream implications for equity, compliance, and patient trust.
Panoramic X-ray is a simple and effective tool for diagnosing dental diseases in clinical practice. When deep learning models are developed to assist dentist in interpreting panoramic X-rays, most of their performance suffers from the limited annotated data, which requires dentist's expertise and a lot of time cost. Although self-supervised learning (SSL) has been proposed to address this challenge, the two-stage process of pretraining and fine-tuning requires even more training time and computational resources. In this paper, we present a self-supervised auxiliary detection (SSAD) framework, which is plug-and-play and compatible with any detectors. It consists of a reconstruction branch and a detection branch. Both branches are trained simultaneously, sharing the same encoder, without the need for finetuning. The reconstruction branch learns to restore the tooth texture of healthy or diseased teeth, while the detection branch utilizes these learned features for diagnosis. To enhance the encoder's ability to capture fine-grained features, we incorporate the image encoder of SAM to construct a texture consistency (TC) loss, which extracts image embedding from the input and output of
Apical periodontitis is a prevalent oral pathology that presents significant public health challenges. Despite advances in automated diagnostic systems across various medical fields, the development of Computer-Aided Diagnosis (CAD) applications for apical periodontitis is still constrained by the lack of a large-scale, high-quality annotated dataset. To address this issue, we release a large-scale panoramic radiograph benchmark called "PerioXrays", comprising 3,673 images and 5,662 meticulously annotated instances of apical periodontitis. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first benchmark dataset for automated apical periodontitis diagnosis. This paper further proposes a clinical-oriented apical periodontitis detection (PerioDet) paradigm, which jointly incorporates Background-Denoising Attention (BDA) and IoU-Dynamic Calibration (IDC) mechanisms to address the challenges posed by background noise and small targets in automated detection. Extensive experiments on the PerioXrays dataset demonstrate the superiority of PerioDet in advancing automated apical periodontitis detection. Additionally, a well-designed human-computer collaborative experiment underscores the clinical a
Occlusal contacts are the locations at which the occluding surfaces of the maxilla and the mandible posterior teeth meet. Occlusal contact detection is a vital tool for restoring the loss of masticatory function and is a mandatory assessment in the field of dentistry, with particular importance in prosthodontics and restorative dentistry. The most common method for occlusal contact detection is articulating paper. However, this method can indicate significant medically false positive and medically false negative contact areas, leaving the identification of true occlusal indications to clinicians. To address this, we propose a multiclass Vision Transformer and Fully Convolutional Network ensemble semantic segmentation model with a combination hierarchical loss function, which we name as Hierarchical Fully Convolutional Branch Transformer (H-FCBFormer). We also propose a method of generating medically true positive semantic segmentation masks derived from expert annotated articulating paper masks and gold standard masks. The proposed model outperforms other machine learning methods evaluated at detecting medically true positive contacts and performs better than dentists in terms of a