Clinical Decision Support System for Geriatric Dental Treatment Using a Bayesian Network and a Convolutional Neural Network

Objectives: The aim of this study was to evaluate the performance of a clinical decision support system (CDSS) for therapeutic plans in geriatric dentistry. The information that needs to be considered in a therapeutic plan includes not only the patient's oral health status obtained from an oral examination, but also other related factors such as underlying diseases, socioeconomic characteristics, and functional dependency. Methods: A Bayesian network (BN) was used as a framework to construct a model of contributing factors and their causal relationships based on clinical knowledge and data. The faster R-CNN (regional convolutional neural network) algorithm was used to detect oral health status, which was part of the BN structure. The study was conducted using retrospective data from 400 patients receiving geriatric dental care at a university hospital between January 2020 and June 2021. Results: The model showed an F1-score of 89.31%, precision of 86.69%, and recall of 82.14% for the detection of periodontally compromised teeth. A receiver operating characteristic curve analysis showed that the BN model was highly accurate for recommending therapeutic plans (area under the curve = 0.902). The model performance was compared to that of experts in geriatric dentistry, and the experts and the system strongly agreed on the recommended therapeutic plans (kappa value = 0.905). Conclusions: This research was the first phase of the development of a CDSS to recommend geriatric dental treatment. The proposed system, when integrated into the clinical workflow, is expected to provide general practitioners with expert-level decision support in geriatric dental care.