Dr Tom Williams PhD, CTO, Manchester Imaging Presents at the Annual Welsh Dental Society Conference

The latest developments in Dental AI can assist dentists to diagnose and treat disease.  However, to make the most of their potential, users need to understand how they work and how they should interpret their output. This talk provided an understanding of how AI works, different ways you can use AI in your surgery and consider if AI in Dentistry has the potential to deliver a real benefit to the profession and patients, or is it just hype and publicity?

Using AssistDent as a case study, Dr Williams spoke about how AI systems detect disease; have the potential to provide increased efficacy in the practice and improve patient care and communication. 

AssistDent is an AI software that detects early interproximal enamel caries in bitewing radiographs. These lesions are easily missed by dentists as they can be difficult to detect due to their small size and image artefacts.  Data of sufficient quality and consistency is required to train AI machine learning, so that the algorithm can learn meaningful patterns.  Data sets also need to be sufficiently large, varied and free from bias to cover all the expected operational input data. He went on to detail some of the AI algorithms and architectures employed by AssistDent and the level of accuracy and automation provided. 

Also welcome and important was the coverage and description of other AI-based dental solutions that are currently available and/or in development and the discussion evolved into how they might provide benefits to dentists and their patients.

This naturally led to crucially acknowledged best practice guidelines for the use of AI by dental professionals, which essentially help improve the clinical accuracy and patient care.

Identification of the common challenges and barriers to adoption, such as integration with the dentist’s existing software and workflow, plus the cost of the equipment and additional training was explored too. 

CPD Learning Outcomes 

·         Awareness of the latest developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Dentistry 

·         An understanding of what AI is and can achieve in dentistry and the potential benefits for dentists and their patients 

·         An understanding of how AI works and best practice in the dental surgery 

·         Awareness of the potential shortcomings of using AI and the challenges of integrating it into a dentist’s clinical workflow