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28 exclusive interview DENTAL TECHNOLOGY, APRIL-JUNE 2023

How Artificial

Intelligence Is

Changing Dentistry

One of the growing topics of discussion in our profession is around the expanding use of artificial
intelligence. The use of artificial intelligence (AI) is not new in health care applications. AI can be
seen in robotic surgeries, image and data analysis and assisting clinical diagnostics. We are now
seeing these tools expand beyond the typical hospital or primary care setting to include health
care providers like dentists to create a new standard of care. We spoke with Aadit Kapoor, a San
Francisco based full stack data scientist who is leading the effort to build A.I applications within
the dental industry to learn more about the role of AI in this field of medicine.

In simple terms what is AI and Data Science and what is guage models can also be fine-tuned on 3D scans to increase and accel-
Q.their significance in dentistry? erate output. Another major benefit is AI’s ability to standardize dental
Simply put, Artificial Intelligence is the simulation of human intelligence diagnosis and treatment. Dentists’ evaluation of patient data is subjec-
in machines. The term was coined by John McCarthy in 1955. In recent tive, and research has shown that diagnosis is not always consistent
times, there has been an influx of A.I research which is driven particular- between different dentists. Smart, new technologies in dentistry provide
ly by increased computing and exponential data increase. Primarily a way to significantly increase consistency, and as a result, improve
researchers have worked on machine vision and language understanding patient health.
problems. Data Science (DS) is the study of data to extract meaningful
insights for the business. A.I and Machine Learning (A subset of Artificial Could you please explain a bit about the ways in which
Intelligence) are some of the techniques that could be applied to data to Q.AI has already been integrated into dentistry?
gain information or maximize a business impact. A.I. is being actively integrated into dentistry from automating diagnosis
Dentistry is a broad field and given its interdependence with technol- to using A.I in designing crowns. A certain class of computer vision algo-
ogy, it is the perfect candidate for applying data science and artificial rithms (such as Convolutional Neural Networks) is actively utilized to
intelligence techniques to improve patient care. Broadly speaking, if detect tooth decay, identify cavities, etc. Typically, we see an augmented
there is adequate data and a defined business problem then DS and A.I form of intelligence where instead of replacing dentists, these services
can be extremely beneficial to the business. DS can significantly acceler- help or accelerate the radiograph diagnosis. Additionally, A.I assisted
ate dental lab output via computer vision, OR (Operations Research), CAD/CAM design software utilizing A.I algorithms creates faster design
and predictive maintenance. From a dentist’s point of view, A.I can be generation thus increasing lab output.
made to understand the designs of the intraoral scans, thus providing a
faster output. Additionally, A.I techniques could be utilized for faster There has been a lot of buzz about “Generative A.I”.
diagnosis and patient cost estimator via automatically estimating the Q.Could you explain the significance of Generative A.I
probability of oral diseases. Technologies such as GPT or particularly lan- and how it can change dental laboratories?