Artificial Intelligence in Dentistry: The Current Concepts and a Peek into the Future

Abstract

Introduction: Humans have recreated intelligence for effective human decision making and to unburden themselves of the stupendous workload. Artificial intelligence can act as a supplemental tool to improve diagnosis and treatment care but intelligent machines can never be 'human'. The field of artificial intelligence is relatively young but has still come a long way in the fields of medicine and dentistry. Hence, there is a need for the dentists to be aware about its potential implications for a lucrative clinical practice in the future.

Artificial Intelligence-A New Millennium in Dentistry

“…It also delivers tele-assistance in cases of dental emergencies when the dental health care professional cannot be contacted. Use of intraoral scanners and cameras has given a major advantage in the process of diagnosis and treatment planning [3].…”

Artificial intelligence in dentistry and its future

“…Introduced by Lothfi A. Zadeh in 1962, it is the science of principles of human reasoning, thinking and inference that recognizes and uses real world phenomenon to interpret outcome and diagnosis [7,8]. The concept behind this is to overcome human reasoning ability that is not accurate and precise all the time.…”

“…It can alert the patient and the dentist of any genetic or lifestyle mutative disease indicating increased susceptibility to dental diseases. It also helps in online emergency health consultancies [7,9]. In this time of pandemic online consultations have gained increased importance owing to which a virtual database gives easy access to the medical and dental history of the patient making it easier for dentist/ doctor to treat the patient.…”

“…It helps in diagnosis and provides treatment options. Integrated with imaging systems like MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) and CBCT (Cone Beam Computed Tomography) it can identify even the minute deviations from normal which can go unnoticed by the human eye 7 . Dental practice which was antecedently restricted to two-dimensional (2D) images can be visualized three-dimensionally (3D) as well.…”

Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Detection and Localization of Unobturated Second Mesial Buccal (MB2) Canals in Cone-Beam Computed Tomography (CBCT)

“…A subset of AI, deep learning (DL), is comprised of multiple hidden layers of neural networks that mimic the function of biological neurons to progressively “learn” by extracting features from the input data [ 15 ]. Most of this implementation is centered on neural networks, such as convolutional neural networks (CNNs) [ 16 , 17 ]. With the introduction of AI in healthcare, DL is being used to streamline and supplement a practitioner’s knowledge in a wide range of areas, such as disease prediction and diagnosis and optimized management [ 15 , 18 , 19 ].…”