OralCam: Enabling Self-Examination and Awareness of Oral Health Using a Smartphone Camera

TL;DR

OralCam is a novel smartphone app that enables users to self-examine common oral conditions through photos, providing understandable results to promote oral health awareness, supported by expert validation and user studies.

Contribution

This work introduces the first interactive mobile app for self-examination of oral health conditions using deep learning and user-friendly explanations.

Findings

Achieved an average detection sensitivity of 0.787 for five oral conditions.

Most users found OralCam easy to use and interpret.

Expert validation supports OralCam's potential for oral health awareness.

Abstract

Due to a lack of medical resources or oral health awareness, oral diseases are often left unexamined and untreated, affecting a large population worldwide. With the advent of low-cost, sensor-equipped smartphones, mobile apps offer a promising possibility for promoting oral health. However, to the best of our knowledge, no mobile health (mHealth) solutions can directly support a user to self-examine their oral health condition. This paper presents OralCam, the first interactive app that enables end-users' self-examination of five common oral conditions (diseases or early disease signals) by taking smartphone photos of one's oral cavity. OralCam allows a user to annotate additional information (e.g. living habits, pain, and bleeding) to augment the input image, and presents the output hierarchically, probabilistically and with visual explanations to help a laymen user understand examination results. Developed on our in-house dataset that consists of 3,182 oral photos annotated by dental experts, our deep learning based framework achieved an average detection sensitivity of 0.787 over five conditions with high localization accuracy. In a week-long in-the-wild user study (N=18), most participants had no trouble using OralCam and interpreting the examination results. Two expert interviews further validate the feasibility of OralCam for promoting users' awareness of oral health.