Personalized dental medicine, artificial intelligence, and their relevance for dentomaxillofacial imaging

Abstract

Personalized medicine refers to the tailoring of diagnostics and therapeutics to individuals based on one’s biological, social, and behavioral characteristics. While personalized dental medicine is still far from being a reality, advanced artificial intelligence (AI) technologies with improved data analytic approaches are expected to integrate diverse data from the individual, setting, and system levels, which may facilitate a deeper understanding of the interaction of these multi level data and therefore bring us closer to more personalized, predictive, preventive, and participatory dentistry, also known as P4 dentistry. In the field of dentomaxillofacial imaging, a wide range of AI applications, including several commercially available software options, have been proposed to assist dentists in the diagnosis and treatment planning of various dentomaxillofacial diseases, with performance similar or even superior to that of specialists. Notably, the impact of these dental AI applications on treatment decision, clinical and patient-reported outcomes, and cost-effectiveness has so far been assessed sparsely. Such information should be further investigated in future studies to provide patients, providers, and healthcare organizers a clearer picture of the true usefulness of AI in daily dental practice.

Features and networks of the mandible on computed tomography

“…In parallel to precision medicine [31], precision dentistry [32,33] is an emerging area of research that has potential to achieve precise dental diagnostics and targeted treatment. Important roles of AI and image analysis for contribution to precision dentistry have been quickly realized [34]. The feature extraction and network analysis proposed in this study can be relevant to gaining insights into dentomaxillofacial imaging.…”

Implications of large language models such as ChatGPT for dental medicine

“…Rapid advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) offer numerous benefits to health care professionals, including improved diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of diseases and injuries 1 . In dental medicine, for example, machine learning applications are on the verge of causing a step change in radiographic caries detection 2,3 . Large language models (LLMs) are AI applications trained on hundreds of terabytes of textual data.…”