US researchers have invented an artificial intelligence tool to assist clinicians in determining the next steps for patients’ orthodontic care.
“If you get two orthodontists in a room, they will disagree on 50 per cent of the patients they are diagnosing, to varying degrees,” said Dr Madhur Upadhyay at UConn’s School of Dental Medicine, University of Connecticut.
“Everybody’s reading the same literature, but they are perhaps interpreting it in different ways. Artificial intelligence can do this job very nicely—assimilating the literature and then interpreting it in ways that are perhaps more accurate than how most of us will interpret it.”
The algorithm draws on a deep network of medical literature and expert decisions to indicate whether it agrees or disagrees with an orthodontist’s analysis.
Positive results, where the algorithm is in agreement with the doctor’s diagnosis, provide more peace of mind to clinicians and patients. Negative results prompt the clinicians to take another look and determine the source of the discrepancy between the algorithm’s projected diagnosis and their own.
While any former wearer of braces can attest that the process of shifting teeth can be unpleasant, the diagnostic acumen required from orthodontists may be less obvious from the patient’s chair. But determining the best placement for a patient’s teeth—and the best course of action to guide them there—is a precise science, one that can be augmented with the capabilities of AI.
Inaccurate diagnoses can result in jaw pain, bone loss, gum recession, and other dental issues that are difficult to correlate with past orthodontia when they develop years down the line. Including the ‘second voice’ of AI will ensure better patient outcomes in the long term.
A successful orthodontic diagnosis considers aesthetics, function, and structure. All these domains are interconnected so an inaccurate diagnosis can be catastrophic.
In addition to improving patient outcomes, the algorithm will free up valuable time for providers, allowing them to diagnose more patients without compromising accuracy.
“A significant amount of human power is wasted in doing mundane jobs like cropping figures, resizing figures, drawing some lines on them to interpret them—which are pretty basic things,” Dr Upadhyay said.
“A system should be automatically able to do it.”
