Automated virtual patient creation: can AI assist the esthetic outcome?

Abstract:

Although AI is widely accepted in daily life, dentistry still approaches it with caution due to the precision required in diagnosis and treatment. Indeed, dentists worry that relying on AI could compromise the quality of care. However, with proper supervised learning and collaboration between AI engineers and dental specialists, AI can achieve high accuracy. When developed responsibly, AI can become a fast and consistent assistant to practitioners. This surely applies to prosthodontic specialists, who need to gather all image data for a particular treatment to allow multimodal registration and virtual patient creation. Where this method is usually demanding a high level of competence and time, AI may facilitate this process without jeopardising the quality as such that patient-specific functional and aesthetic demands to hard and soft tissues of the orofacial region may be visualised in 3D prior to the actual treatment. This approach ensures that prosthodontists can embrace AI-based digital workflows and virtual patient creation for 3D planning of patient-specific treatments with high aesthetic demands. In time, AI may become the indispensable assistant of the future prosthodontic practice.