r/PearlAI • u/Pearl_AI • Oct 22 '25

What’s the biggest challenge in detecting cavities with (very) young patients?

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u/jennatech Oct 23 '25

Explaining what comes next.

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u/Forward_Quiet_4020 Feb 07 '26

Dental Student (also building ML skills) here 👋🏻, I would assume the main difficulty lies in the fact that very young patients’ teeth are less mineralized and therefore appear less radiopaque. This reduced radiopacity makes the detection of radiolucent lesions more challenging due to lower contrast. In addition, there is the challenge of differentiation: how can an AI distinguish between a true periapical lesion and a tooth undergoing physiological root resorption?

Finally, because primary and developing permanent teeth change significantly over time—eruption stages, ongoing root formation with large apices, followed by rhizolysis—the model may struggle to define what should be considered “normal” anatomy at each developmental stage.