GlobalDentBench: A Multinational Benchmark for Evaluating LLM Clinical Reasoning in Dentistry with Expert Calibration

While large language models (LLMs) hold transformative potential for medicine, their reasoning robustness and safety in real-world clinical scenarios remain critically underexplored, particularly in dentistry. Here we introduce GlobalDentBench, the first multinational dental benchmark, featuring a taxonomy that encompasses 14 dental specialties across 88 countries and regions spanning six continents. The benchmark comprises 8,978 expert-validated questions across three formats (multiple-choice, short-answer, and case-based questions) and assesses three progressive reasoning levels: knowledge recall (L1), routine reasoning (L2), and individualized reasoning (L3). To ensure data quality, the automated construction framework was calibrated by six senior dentists, achieving expert agreement rates of 99.98% for multiple-choice and short-answer questions and 96.78% for the more complex case-based questions. Evaluation of 12 frontier LLMs on GlobalDentBench revealed a sharp, stepwise performance degradation with increasing reasoning complexity. Specifically, accuracy plummeted from 81.34% on multiple-choice to 64.53% on short-answer and 22.34% on case-based questions, while declining markedly from 74.01% at L1 to 55.64% at L2 and 35.71% at L3. More critically, risk analysis of real-world dental cases demonstrated an alarming overall unsafe rate of 31.01% in LLM-generated clinical recommendations, with 4.51% posing risks of irreversible patient harm and risks particularly pronounced in specialties such as orthodontics. These findings expose fundamental limitations in the medical reasoning and safety of current LLMs. Consequently, GlobalDentBench provides a scalable foundation for trustworthy clinical AI evaluation, underscoring the urgent need for rigorous validation before the safe deployment of these models in healthcare.

Interpretable and Interactive Deep Multiple Instance Learning for Dental Caries Classification in Bitewing X-rays

We propose a simple and efficient image classification architecture based on deep multiple instance learning, and apply it to the challenging task of caries detection in dental radiographs. Technically, our approach contributes in two ways: First, it outputs a heatmap of local patch classification probabilities despite being trained with weak image-level labels. Second, it is amenable to learning from segmentation labels to guide training. In contrast to existing methods, the human user can faithfully interpret predictions and interact with the model to decide which regions to attend to. Experiments are conducted on a large clinical dataset of $\sim$38k bitewings ($\sim$316k teeth), where we achieve competitive performance compared to various baselines. When guided by an external caries segmentation model, a significant improvement in classification and localization performance is observed.