Artificial Intelligence's Use in the Diagnosis of Mouth Ulcers: A Systematic Review

Abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been cited as being helpful in the diagnosis of diseases, the prediction of prognoses, and the development of patient-specific therapeutic strategies. AI can help dentists, in particular, when they need to make important judgments quickly. It can eliminate human mistakes in making decisions, resulting in superior and consistent medical treatment while lowering the workload on dentists. The existing studies relevant to the study and application of AI in the diagnosis of various forms of mouth ulcers are reviewed in this work. The Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) standards were followed in the preparation of the review. There were no rule violations, with the significant exception of the use of a better search method that led to more accurate findings. Using search terms mainly such as AI, oral health, oral ulcers, oral herpes simplex, oral lichen planus, pemphigus vulgaris, recurrent aphthous ulcer (RAU), oral cancer, premalignant and malignant disorders, etc., a comprehensive search was carried out in the reliable sources of literature, namely PubMed, Scopus, Embase, Web of Science, Ovid, Global Health, and PsycINFO. For all papers, exhaustive searches were done using inclusion criteria as well as exclusion criteria between June 28, 2018, and June 28, 2023. An AI framework for the automatic categorization of oral ulcers from oral clinical photographs was developed by the authors, and it performed satisfactorily. The newly designed AI model works better than the current convolutional neural network image categorization techniques and shows a fair level of precision in the classification of oral ulcers. However, despite being useful for identifying oral ulcers, the suggested technique needs a broader set of data for validation and training purposes before being used in clinical settings. Automated OCSCC identification using a deep learning-based technique is a quick, harmless, affordable, and practical approach to evaluating the effectiveness of cancer treatment. The categorization and identification of RAU lesions through the use of non-intrusive oral pictures using the previously developed ResNet50 and YOLOV algorithms demonstrated better accuracy as well as adequate potential for the future, which could be helpful in clinical practice. Moreover, the most reliable projections for the likelihood of the presence or absence of RAU were made by the optimized neural network. The authors also discovered variables associated with RAU that might be used as input information to build artificial neural networks that anticipate RAU.

Keywords: artificial intelligence; dentistry; oral medicine; oral ulcers; review; systematic.

Figure 1. PRISMA flowchart showing the systematic selection of articles