A Genetic Algorithm-Optimized ConvNeXtV2-YOLOv8 Framework for Dental Caries Detection in Panoramic Radiographs

Abstract

Background/Objectives: Dental caries is one of the most common oral diseases worldwide, and early diagnosis is essential for effective treatment. However, detecting carious lesions in panoramic radiographs is challenging because of low image contrast, anatomical complexity, and overlapping structures. This study aimed to develop an improved object detection framework for dental caries localization in panoramic radiographs. Methods: A modified YOLOv8 architecture was developed by integrating ConvNeXtV2 blocks into the Cross-Stage Partial (C2f) modules to enhance feature extraction and gradient propagation. To improve detection performance and reduce overfitting, key training hyperparameters were optimized using a genetic algorithm. The proposed model was evaluated on a dataset of 474 panoramic dental radiographs annotated by experts using bounding boxes. Results: The optimized model achieved a box precision of 78.4%, a recall of 53.6%, and a mean average precision at 50% intersection-over-union threshold (AP50) of 62.6%. Compared with the baseline YOLOv8 model, the proposed approach improved precision and AP50. Visual and quantitative analyses demonstrated that the ConvNeXtV2-enhanced architecture enabled more accurate localization of carious regions. Conclusions: The results indicate that combining ConvNeXtV2-based architectural enhancement with genetic algorithm-based hyperparameter optimization is an effective strategy for dental caries localization in panoramic radiographs. Although recall remains a limitation, the proposed framework shows potential as a computer-aided diagnostic tool for supporting clinical caries assessment.