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Artificial intelligence in dentistry: What it is, how it can improve dental care and what should dentists know?

BDJ In Practice volume 35, pages 12–15 (2022)Cite this article

To define AI, we can first ask ourselves what intelligence actually is. The English Oxford Learners Dictionary describes Intelligence as 'The ability to learn, understand and think in a logical way about things.1 We originally associated intelligence only with living beings.2 However, intelligence may not be reserved for living beings anymore: Machines can be programmed to solve tasks that were originally only solvable when human reasoning was involved; machines get able to learn, understand problems and find solutions. Notably, the underlying algorithms and mathematical models are not copies of human brains - machine intelligence does not work like human intelligence - but have been inspired by human neurophysiology to some degree.

The term AI was first coined in the 1950s. Over time there were periods of excitement and euphoria as well as periods where expectations towards AI were not meet by the outcomes; the latter periods were termed 'AI winters'. Notably today, the optimism is greater than ever, mainly as hardware and compute, powerful, freely available algorithms and software, and data at hand converge to a state that enables a new 'AI spring'.

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References

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Oral Diagnostics, Digital Health and Health Services Research, Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Martha Duchrau & Falk Schwendicke

  2. Department of Oral Diagnostics, Digital Health and Health Services Research, Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Joachim Krois

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  1. Martha Duchrau
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Correspondence to Martha Duchrau.

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Duchrau, M., Krois, J. & Schwendicke, F. Artificial intelligence in dentistry: What it is, how it can improve dental care and what should dentists know?. BDJ In Pract 35, 12–15 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41404-022-1197-x

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