3D digital imaging in the age of AI - a look at the (potential) impact on Dental Medicine.

Personalized medicine and dentistry refers to the tailoring of diagnostics and therapeutics to individuals based on each patient's biological, social, and behavioral characteristics and needs. While personalized dental medicine is still far from being a reality, advanced artificial intelligence (AI) technologies with improved data analytic approaches are expected to integrate diverse data from the individual, setting, and system levels, which may facilitate a deeper understanding of the interaction of these multi-level data and therefore bring us closer to more personalized, predictive, preventive, and participatory dentistry, also known as P4 dentistry. In the field of dentomaxillofacial imaging, a wide range of AI applications, including several commercially available software options, have been proposed to assist dentists in the diagnosis and treatment planning of various dentomaxillofacial diseases, with performance similar or even superior to that of specialists.

The present lecture will discuss and elaborate on the impact of these dental AI applications on treatment decision, clinical and patient-reported outcomes, and cost-effectiveness. Such information should be further investigated to provide patients, providers, and healthcare organizers a clearer picture of the true usefulness of AI in daily dental practice.

Learning Objectives:

• Know the definition of 4P medicine and dentistry
• Know about history of AI in general, and dental medicine / dento-maxillofacial radiology more specifically
• Know about current use of AI for image diagnosis and treatment planning
• Know about future developments of AI in dental medicine with special focus on LLM / multimodal AI models