The implementation of Artificial Intelligence in the medical field is much more complicated than in any other area because the cost of mistakes and omissions in healthcare facilities — human lives and well-being — is too high.
That's why the learning processes for such algorithms take a lot of time and usually produce modest results.
For instance, a recently invented AI system can determine individuals' sex by dental panoramic radiographs — X-ray images of human jaws and teeth. The algorithm is quite precise and has a 97% accuracy for adult patients.
How does it work, and why it's important? Let's see in the further article.
What is the main complication?
To teach the AI system how to complete a particular task, you should provide it with tons of correctly described data. In simple words, if you need to distinguish a cat from a dog, you should upload dozens of thousands of annotated images of both animals. These data may be collected from internet users by passing a captcha, etc.
But distinguishing sex based on a photo of jaws and teeth is a much more complicated task — to gain such skill, forensic experts have trained for years. To educate AI to complete this function successfully, you should provide it with a high amount of correctly annotated and reviewed (by a bunch of specialists) dental X-rays.
This is exactly what the researchers did, collecting about 207 000 panoramic radiographs from 15 Brazilian clinical centers. The data includes 58% of female patients, and 48% of patients have different numbers of missing teeth.
What are the results?
The research group created two algorithms with different learning models and 'fed' them with collected radiographs. At the end of the experiment, both of them demonstrated very similar accuracy in sex determination:
- 87% - for a children group between 6 and 16 years
- 97% - for a group of patients aged 20-50
- 95% and below - for patients above 70 years
Such results are pretty promising. It is a completed, well-tuned (at least for the area where it was created) digital tool that may become part of future "digital dentists" and assist real dentists in treating people faster and more effectively.
If you want to know more about Dental AI…
You should read our extended guide to this technology, which was compiled by Remedico and Prof. Falk Schwendicke — an experienced specialist in healthcare AI.
