Artificial intelligence has grabbed the attention of the dental industry in recent years as clinicians and executives realize its potential for patient care and operational processes.
Here is what four dental leaders recently told Becker's about AI in dentistry:
Where dentistry needs more innovation
Barry Lyon, DDS. Chief Dental Officer for the Division of Orthodontics and Pediatric Dentistry at Dental Care Alliance (Sarasota, Fla.): Artificial intelligence has come a long way. It is a reliable method of diagnosing dental disease in adults and providing a pathway to an accurate treatment plan. Pediatric dentists can take advantage of AI’s ability to reveal obvious and incipient carious lesions, and it can aid in treatment planning the appropriate pulpal therapies.
Although it is in development, AI’s ability to reveal skeletal problems via a cephalometric analysis will be a boon to orthodontists. It will aid in diagnosis and the development of proper treatment sequences.
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Christy Englehart. COO of PepperPointe Partnerships (Lexington, Ky.): AI is here to stay and I think that helps us to replace manual processes that we've done in our past. AI allows us to be more accurate with data and more efficient as we process, so I continue to follow the AI opportunities that are out there in the business.
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Dan Hosler. CEO of Allied OMS (Southlake, Texas): We are exploring smart ways to use [artificial intelligence] in the day-to-day workflows of our practices, and how we can rapidly share innovation and best practices among our surgeons utilizing technology and AI-guided process automation. Our goal is to ensure a consistent and brisk pace of innovation at the platform level, so our doctors can progressively enhance responsiveness, sophistication and quality of care when our patients need us most.
Dentistry could become a leader in AI use: VideaHealth CEO
Florian Hillen. Founder and CEO of VideaHealth: The number one thing, which is unfortunately also a misconception right now with ChatGPT, et cetera, is the misconception that it's AI versus the expert, which would be the dentist. That is not true. The dentist and the AI as a collaborative unit can do a faster, quicker job and have an easier time than dentists without AI. [It] is a collaboration between the dentists and the AI together, not against each other. It's a win-win situation. We see this in the real world. Clinicians who might have initially been reluctant to leverage AI are now using VideaAI for every case, every day.
The second thing is that patients like it too ... It's incredibly powerful to see your own X-rays with the AI. It just increases your understanding. You start to co-diagnose with the dentist. It's just incredibly powerful and I believe that patients will benefit from that experience quite a lot. We already see that happening.