Electronic Health Reporter

Dental health has always been an important aspect of your overall well-being. While most people may perceive dentistry as a means to improve one’s aesthetic, this is but an extra perk of visiting your dentist regularly. There are a wide variety of diseases and they all function the same way —through infection.

When a pathogen is able to gain ingress into your body that is called an infection. And one of the means of ingress are the teeth. A tooth cavity or an abscess are both dangerous in the sense that they are infections waiting to happen.

In the digital age, daily life is enhanced by the technology that we have. For one instance, traditional X-ray images had to be printed on a metal sheet and processed the way you would a camera film. Today, thanks to digital photography, the image is instantly projected onto monitors and saved to a database. There’s no longer the waiting phase. It goes straight to the diagnosis phase.

In previous iterations of the technology, the way that orthodontic diagnostics were performed was that dentists had to make a temporary mold of the patient’s crown (to be replaced) while the permanent mold of the crown would be made back at the lab.

Because of digital photography and 3D printing, dentists simply have to scan the crown that they intend to replace and add it to the database. The computer then simply prints out the replacement crown on the spot.

And while this technology seems impressive, there has been one piece of tech that has been on everyone’s lips for the past few months — artificial intelligence.

It first became publicly known when Google introduced it with its new line of Pixel phones. The artificial intelligence found in these phones was able to significantly improve the photo quality taken by the phone camera. A plethora of phone manufacturers, such as Asus, Huawei, and Oppo, followed suit thereafter.

What most people don’t know is that in the medical field, AI is currently being used to make the process of diagnosis more efficient and more accurate. IBM brought its Watson platform into the picture and it is currently used to help doctors make the best diagnosis and recommend treatment based on the patient’s medical history.

The software is even being further developed for it to be able to schedule medical procedures based on its estimated procedure durations. What this does is that it helps improve the efficiency at which hospitals operate by ensuring that time is used in the best way possible. So, this translates to an overall higher number of patients treated.

The same application can be brought into dentistry. A program known as VisualDX allows dentists and doctors alike to input images onto a computer. The computer is then able to produce a full list of all possible diagnoses.

While Bellevue, Washington dentists are generally considered to be some of the best in the field, it’s noteworthy to think that with the help of artificial intelligence, everything can still be further improved.

And while the place of artificial intelligence in the medical practices has yet to establish a strong foothold, it’s clear the future is one where artificial intelligence is the core foundation of all technologies.