The Role of AI In Modern Dentistry: Experts' Opinion

Healthcare is an industry that has adopted AI most fascinatingly, implementing it in almost every area of treatment and research: from gene therapy research and biomarker detection to clinic management and dental treatment assistance. 

The latter is a comprehensive topic – modern learning models allow us to create software that helps to see oral health problems more clearly, analyze patients’ health histories to receive new health insights, create 3D prosthesis models, etc. 

Still, all this abundance of AI-powered tools requires a theoretical systematization, and in this article, we collected recent expert opinions regarding the most promising field of technology application. 

The practical definition of the technology 

According to Professor Falk Schwendicke, an experienced researcher in the medical AI field, the key role of any AI-powered tool dedicated to being used in real practice is to assist the clinician. 

Any regulators in the US and EU that have approved a practical application of such tools have made it only for one purpose: to help dentists streamline their regular tasks and thus save dozens of work hours per month. 

All modern AI medical tools can not work autonomously, which means that, in fact, the tools that we have now are called augmented intelligence—a tandem of organic and computer cognitive capabilities. By the way, this specification of their application is the leading reason why AI tools will not replace clinicians in the near future. 

Types of AI implementation

Lisa M. Cappello – business operations manager at Feeley Dental and Associates – shared her opinion regarding the most valuable and feasible AI tools in regular dental practice in her comprehensive review for DentistryIQ media. Mrs. Capello defined several of the most well-developed and workable solutions at this moment:

1. Diagnostic tools. Some novel AI representatives can analyze dental scans, X-rays, and other visual data to highlight problematic zones and focus dentists' attention on them.
2. Increase patient understanding. AI models can visually represent the dental issue to the patient to show what exactly happened in the patient’s mouth cavity, and therefore, improve their understanding of the necessity of the treatment. 
3. Teledentistry. Remote monitoring tools and software can allow dentists to check patients’ health conditions without scheduling a visit to the dental clinic.

Additionally, Lisa Capello defines a few AI types that can effectively enhance the administrative process in your clinic:

1. Patient communication. Modern chatbots demonstrate notable capabilities in natural communication. Therefore, they may be used to automate appointment scheduling via a smart helper on a clinic's website or to answer common patients' questions and provide them with post-treatment recommendations. 
2. Patient data analysis. Some AI systems can analyze appointment attendance, treatment flow, and other clinic patient information to provide doctors and managers with various insights, such as predicting visit cancellations, recommending follow-up appointments, etc. 
3. Administrative process streamlining. AI is perfect for management tasks like billing, automated message reminders, etc.

Point of concern

Despite their impressive effectiveness, modern AI technologies have notable limitations that still prevent us from fully integrating them into all aspects of the medical services industry. Thus, Dr. Falk Schwendike highlighted the key problem in modern AI-powered software in our recent NextDental Podcast episode. 

And this problem is AI bias. To teach the let's say, diagnostic AI tool to do some tasks, developers need to “feed” it a tremendous amount of annotated images and other visual data, so the software can learn what exactly physiological abnormalities look like. However, the thing is that human physiology and data quality are so different that the same software can not work well with all populations. 

For instance, software that showed almost 100% accuracy in Germany can demonstrate 10-15% in Saudi Arabia, and so on. Therefore, it’s crucial for successful AI-tool implementation in your practice to check which data sets were used during the software development, and whether they are suitable for your region. 

Keep abreast!

If you are a passionate dental specialist or clinic manager who wants to learn more about implementing AI tools in your regular practice, watch the full episode of the NextDental Podcast with Dr. Falk Schwendicke on our YouTube channel.