Applications of artificial intelligence in orthodontics: a bibliometric and visual analysis

To conduct a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of the literature on artificial intelligence (AI) applications in orthodontics to provide a detailed overview of the current research trends, influential works, and future directions.

A research strategy in The Web of Science Core Collection has been conducted to identify original articles regarding the use of AI in orthodontics. Articles were screened and selected by two independent reviewers and the following data were imported and processed for analysis: rankings, centrality metrics, publication trends, co-occurrence and clustering of keywords, journals, articles, authors, nations, and organizations. Data were analyzed using CiteSpace 6.3.R2 and VOSviewer.

Almost 83% of the 381 chosen articles were released in the last three and a half years. Studies were published either in highly impacted orthodontic journals and also in journals related to informatics engineering, computer science, and medical imaging. Two-thirds of the available literature originated from China, the USA, and South Korea. AI-driven cephalometric landmarking and automatic segmentation were the main areas of research.

This report offers a thorough overview of the AI current trend in orthodontics and it highlights prominent research areas focused on increasing the speed and efficiency of orthodontic care. Furthermore, it offers insight into potential directions for future research.

Collaborative research efforts will be necessary to strengthen the maturity and robustness of AI models and to make AI-based clinical research sufficiently reliable for routine orthodontic clinical practice.