Artificial intelligence (AI) is a revolutionary technology, that is recently being implemented in a wide range of industries and in different sectors. Dentistry is no exception to this trending technology; many researchers have become interested to explore the role of AI and its applications in various dental fields especially in oral and maxillofacial (OMF) radiology. In the near future of dentistry, AI is expected to play an important role in the development of automatic systems designed for tasks such as diagnosis, treatment planning, and also the development of treatment tools tailored to each clinical situation.
In the field of OMF radiology, AI researches focus mainly on using the convolutional neural networks (CNN), to perform tasks such as image classification, segmentation, detection, registration, and refinement. The promising results will pave the road for the future automated diagnostic tasks after precise and efficient radiographic images analysis with subsequent fruitful treatment plan in various fields of dentistry.
To achieve good results in AI a tremendous amounts of data are needed, which will be worked upon by OMF radiologist for accurately assess, categorize, interpret the data sets in a consistent and precise way, which is definitely a time-consuming task. OMF radiologists, as professionals who thoroughly understand the characteristics of radiographic images, will play a very important role in the development of artificial intelligence applications in this field. The fact is AI cannot substitute the role of dentist or OMF radiologist, yet it can provide fascinating diagnostic capabilities in the future, and will be an important part of OMF radiology.