Understanding your AI system’s applied performance can help you leverage its full potential to support your diagnostic decisions and treatment planning processes
Checks and balances are an important part of quality control. This is particularly true when adding new technology, like AI, to your diagnostic workflow. Understanding your AI system, its strengths, and its potential limitations is essential to achieving optimal clinical results.
Critical analysis of your AI system and the data it delivers allows you to:
AI can be a powerful tool in clinical scenarios, but it still must be used with awareness of it can and cannot do, and your clinical judgment and expertise are the final word in your diagnostic protocols.
Below are some factors to consider when evaluating your AI system’s performance in the diagnostic setting.
How often do you and your AI system agree on x-ray findings? While many AI systems outperform an average dentist in detecting common conditions like caries, it is helpful to understand your AI’s performance relative to your specific diagnostic abilities.
Assessing your own accuracy and reliability against your AI output using case-specific data is the best way to accomplish this. Some AI vendors offer a tools for assessment and calibration, but self-assessment works too. Either way, periodic validation and calibration of your AI system can be vital to ensuring the technology's effectiveness in real-world clinical scenarios.
Seek AI solutions that provide transparent radiologic insights that not only complement your diagnostic decision-making processes, but also improve them.
Not every AI system provides the same level of data-driven clinical insight, so it is key to understand both what kinds of information your system can give you and how the AI system you’re using arrives at its clinical conclusions. This knowledge will enable you to interpret the output more effectively and make the most well-informed patient care decisions.
AI should serve you and the unique needs, preferences, and workflows of your dental practice.
Dental AI systems have varying degrees of customizability. It is important to understand the extent – and limitations – of your ability to tailor your AI system to your specific needs. Getting the most out of your AI system requires that you apply every user-customizable setting best serve your specific x-ray sensor, imaging modalities, diagnostic protocols, and overall practice workflows.
A key but frequently forgotten benefit that comes with AI integration into your clinical workflow is team-wide clinical intelligence, even for nonclinical team members. AI not only facilitates a culture of clinical learning and improvement, but also establishes clinical alignment across the entire office staff.
Augmenting your trained human expertise with AI-powered insights enables you to make diagnostic decisions with increased accuracy and timeliness. Computer vision systems can detect subtler variation in grayscale than the human eye, enabling dental software to pick up nuances in diagnostic images, like incipient endodontic infections, that might otherwise fly under the radar. Your AI system’s sensitivity offers a huge opportunity when it comes to minimally invasive treatment planning and production––and a huge benefit to your patient long-term dental health.
Although each patient's oral health needs and conditions are unique, treatment planning always relies on knowledge of similar cases to achieve the desired outcome. AI can use a wealth of historical data to assist with customizing predictive interventions tailored to individual patients. Such data-driven protocols can empower you to make evidence-based treatment decisions that optimize outcomes and minimize risks and complications.
AI integration into the clinical workflow will continue to advance. As it does, dentists who take a more active role in engaging with, understanding, and applying the full range of expanding AI capabilities can be secure in the knowledge that they are delivering the highest standard of care to every patient they see.
Pearl is a global dental AI leader assisting dentists across six continents with robust clinical pathology detection.
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