Developments, application, and performance of artificial intelligence in dentistry - A systematic review.

Area of Science:

• Dental informatics
• Medical artificial intelligence
• Computational dentistry

Background:

• Artificial intelligence (AI) has significantly advanced in dentistry recently.
• AI applications are increasingly integrated into various dental specialties.
• The review focuses on AI's role in diagnosis, decision-making, and prognosis prediction.

Purpose of the Study:

• To systematically review AI applications in dentistry.
• To evaluate AI performance in diagnosis, clinical decision-making, and treatment prognosis.
• To identify widely employed AI technologies in the dental field.

Main Methods:

• Comprehensive literature search across major databases (PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, etc.) from January 2000 to March 2020.
• Inclusion and exclusion criteria applied to 43 selected articles for critical analysis.
• Quality assessment of studies using the QUADAS-2 tool.

Main Results:

• AI is widely implemented across dental specialties, with a focus on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs).
• AI models are utilized for detecting and diagnosing dental caries, fractures, lesions, and diseases, as well as predicting treatment needs and patient demographics.
• Applications include analysis of radiographs, cephalometrics, and identification of conditions like osteoporosis and cancerous lesions.

Conclusions:

• AI-based automated systems demonstrate excellent performance in dentistry.
• These AI systems achieve precision and accuracy comparable to dental specialists.
• In several instances, AI systems have outperformed dental specialists in diagnostic accuracy and performance.