OMNI-Dent: Towards an Accessible and Explainable AI Framework for Automated Dental Diagnosis

Leeje Jang; Yao-Yi Chiang; Angela M. Hastings; Patimaporn Pungchanchaikul; Martha B. Lucas; Emily C. Schultz; Jeffrey P. Louie; Mohamed Estai; Wen-Chen Wang; Ryan H. L. Ip; Boyen Huang

arXiv · 2602.07041

OMNI-Dent: Towards an Accessible and Explainable AI Framework for Automated Dental Diagnosis

Leeje Jang·Yao-Yi Chiang·Angela M. Hastings·Patimaporn Pungchanchaikul·Martha B. Lucas·Emily C. Schultz·Jeffrey P. Louie·Mohamed Estai·Wen-Chen Wang·Ryan H. L. Ip·Boyen Huang

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Abstract

Accurate dental diagnosis is essential for oral healthcare, yet many individuals lack access to timely professional evaluation. Existing AI-based methods primarily treat diagnosis as a visual pattern recognition task and do not reflect the structured clinical reasoning used by dental professionals. These approaches also require large amounts of expert-annotated data and often struggle to generalize across diverse real-world imaging conditions. To address these limitations, we present OMNI-Dent, a data-efficient and explainable diagnostic framework that incorporates clinical reasoning principles into a Vision-Language Model (VLM)-based pipeline. The framework operates on multi-view smartphone photographs,embeds diagnostic heuristics from dental experts, and guides a general-purpose VLM to perform tooth-level evaluation without dental-specific fine-tuning of the VLM. By utilizing the VLM's existing visual-linguistic capabilities, OMNI-Dent aims to support diagnostic assessment in settings where curated clinical imaging is unavailable. Designed as an early-stage assistive tool, OMNI-Dent helps users identify potential abnormalities and determine when professional evaluation may be needed, offering a practical option for individuals with limited access to in-person care.

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Leeje Jang, Yao-Yi Chiang, Angela M. Hastings, Patimaporn Pungchanchaikul, Martha B. Lucas, Emily C. Schultz, Jeffrey P. Louie, Mohamed Estai, Wen-Chen Wang, Ryan H. L. Ip, Boyen Huang. 2026-02-03. OMNI-Dent: Towards an Accessible and Explainable AI Framework for Automated Dental Diagnosis. https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.07041

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