Artificial intelligence in dentistry—A review

Abstract

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the ability of machines to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence. AI is not a new term, the concept of AI can be dated back to 1950. However, it did not become a practical tool until two decades ago. Owing to the rapid development of three cornerstones of current AI technology-big data (coming through digital devices), computational power, and AI algorithm-in the past two decades, AI applications have started to provide convenience to people's lives. In dentistry, AI has been adopted in all dental disciplines, i.e., operative dentistry, periodontics, orthodontics, oral and maxillofacial surgery, and prosthodontics. The majority of the AI applications in dentistry are for diagnosis based on radiographic or optical images, while other tasks are not as applicable as image-based tasks mainly due to the constraints of data availability, data uniformity, and computational power for handling 3D data. Evidence-based dentistry (EBD) is regarded as the gold standard for decision making by dental professionals, while AI machine learning (ML) models learn from human expertise. ML can be seen as another valuable tool to assist dental professionals in multiple stages of clinical cases. This review describes the history and classification of AI, summarizes AI applications in dentistry, discusses the relationship between EBD and ML, and aims to help dental professionals better understand AI as a tool to support their routine work with improved efficiency.

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