{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,7,23]],"date-time":"2026-07-23T15:37:54Z","timestamp":1784821074545,"version":"3.55.0"},"reference-count":37,"publisher":"MDPI AG","issue":"9","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2025,9,2]],"date-time":"2025-09-02T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1756771200000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["Dentistry Journal"],"abstract":"<jats:p>Background: Dental caries arise from a multifactorial interplay between microbial dysbiosis, host immune responses, and enamel degradation visible on radiographs. Deep learning excels in image-based caries detection; however, integrative analyses that combine radiographic, microbiome, and transcriptomic data remain rare because public cohorts are seldom aligned. Objective: To determine whether three independent deep-learning pipelines\u2014radiographic segmentation, microbiome regression, and transcriptome regression\u2014can be reproducible implemented on non-aligned datasets, and to demonstrate the feasibility of estimating microbiome heritability in a matched twin cohort. Methods: (i) A U-Net with ResNet-18 encoder was trained on 100 annotated panoramic radiographs to generate a continuous caries-severity score from a predicted lesion area. (ii) Feed-forward neural networks (FNNs) were trained on supragingival 16S rRNA profiles (81 samples, 750 taxa) and gingival transcriptomes (247 samples, 54,675 probes) using randomly permuted severity scores as synthetic targets to stress-test preprocessing, training, and SHAP-based interpretability. (iii) In 49 monozygotic and 50 dizygotic twin pairs (n = 198), Bray\u2013Curtis dissimilarity quantified microbial heritability, and an FNN was trained to predict recorded TotalCaries counts. Results: The U-Net achieved IoU = 0.564 (95% CI 0.535\u20130.594), precision = 0.624 (95% CI 0.583\u20130.667), recall = 0.877 (95% CI 0.827\u20130.918), and correlated with manual severity scores (r = 0.62, p &lt; 0.01). The synthetic-target FNNs converged consistently but\u2014as intended\u2014showed no predictive power (R2 \u2248 \u22120.15 microbiome; \u22120.18 transcriptome). Twin analysis revealed greater microbiome similarity in monozygotic versus dizygotic pairs (0.475 \u00b1 0.107 vs. 0.557 \u00b1 0.117; p = 0.0005) and a modest correlation between salivary features and caries burden (r = 0.25). Conclusions: Modular deep-learning pipelines remain computationally robust and interpretable on non-aligned datasets; radiographic severity provides a transferable quantitative anchor. Twin-cohort findings confirm heritable patterns in the oral microbiome and outline a pathway toward future clinical translation once patient-matched multi-omics are available. This framework establishes a scalable, reproducible foundation for integrative caries research.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/dj13090402","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2025,9,2]],"date-time":"2025-09-02T14:16:55Z","timestamp":1756822615000},"page":"402","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/mdpi_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":4,"title":["Modular Deep-Learning Pipelines for Dental Caries Data Streams: A Twin-Cohort Proof-of-Concept"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"13","author":[{"given":"\u0218tefan Lucian","family":"Burlea","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Dentoalveolar Surgery, Faculty of Medicine, University of Medicine and Pharmacy \u201cGrigore T. Popa\u201d Ia\u0219i, 700115 Ia\u0219i, Romania"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-2791-3400","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"C\u0103lin Gheorghe","family":"Buzea","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"National Institute of Research and Development for Technical Physics\u2014IFT Ia\u0219i, 700050 Ia\u0219i, Romania"},{"name":"Clinical Emergency Hospital \u201cProf. Dr. Nicolae Oblu\u201d Ia\u0219i, 700309 Ia\u0219i, Romania"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-3863-6904","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Florin","family":"Nedeff","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Environmental Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Agritourism, Faculty of Engineering, \u201cVasile Alecsandri\u201d University of Bac\u0103u, 600115 Bac\u0103u, Romania"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-0922-740X","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Diana","family":"Miril\u0103","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Environmental Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Agritourism, Faculty of Engineering, \u201cVasile Alecsandri\u201d University of Bac\u0103u, 600115 Bac\u0103u, Romania"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Valentin","family":"Nedeff","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Environmental Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Agritourism, Faculty of Engineering, \u201cVasile Alecsandri\u201d University of Bac\u0103u, 600115 Bac\u0103u, Romania"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Maricel","family":"Agop","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Physics Department, \u201cGheorghe Asachi\u201d Technical University Ia\u0219i, 700050 Ia\u0219i, Romania"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-5485-0620","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Drago\u0219 Ioan","family":"Rusu","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Environmental Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Agritourism, Faculty of Engineering, \u201cVasile Alecsandri\u201d University of Bac\u0103u, 600115 Bac\u0103u, Romania"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Laura Elisabeta","family":"Checheri\u021b\u0103","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Occlusology Estetics and Fixed Prostheses Odonto Parodontology and Fixed Prostheses, Faculty of Medicine, University of Medicine and Pharmacy \u201cGrigore T. Popa\u201d Ia\u0219i, 700115 Ia\u0219i, Romania"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"1968","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2025,9,2]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref_1","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Pitts, N.B., Zero, D.T., Marsh, P.D., Ekstrand, K., Weintraub, J.A., Ramos-Gomez, F., Tagami, J., Twetman, S., Tsakos, G., and Ismail, A. (2017). Dental caries. Nat. Rev. Dis. 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