How AI can help you get the most out of your diagnostic x-rays
Often, it’s not what you can see but rather what you can’t see that matters. This is especially (and frustratingly) true when it comes to patients and dental x-rays. But AI’s ability to shed light—and color, and labels—on dental images brings new hope into this scenario. And you don’t need any new imaging technology to seamlessly add it to your chairside workflow.
With AI assistance, you can highlight anomalies in patient x-rays to support your diagnosis and help you explain what they mean. It’s like a chairside second opinion for your diagnosis and treatment planning. The result? Better patient education and enhanced trust in your recommendations, no matter what is obvious (or not) on the x-ray.
The power of this technology and dentistry’s position in its development cannot be overstated. As Ophir Tanz, Pearl’s CEO and founder, puts it:
"AI is a paradigm-shifting technology that will add value across the entire healthcare continuum. Because x-rays are a regular part of every dental patient’s experience, the first place most will encounter the power of medical AI technology will be in their dentist’s chair."
Dental AI software is trained to identify the detailed features of teeth, bone structures, restorations, and dental pathologies. This training involves thousands and thousands of expertly annotated radiographs showing the range of normal and abnormal findings—the “ground truth” image data.
As the AI system learns what is normal and what is pathological, its diagnostic accuracy is enhanced. Eventually, it can interpret and mark new images as reliably as an expert clinician—or even more so.
With this ability, a fully trained dental AI system can take x-rays obtained with your practice’s existing imaging technology and help you:
Perspective is everything when reviewing your patients’ x-rays. It’s essential to be aware of every condition they reveal that might impact a patient’s health and lifestyle, especially those that may have systemic effects.
AI supported dental imaging technology has the capability to:
For the human eye, reading a radiograph is as much art as science, and diagnoses based on the same x-ray can vary based on the reader. Your patients rely on your ability to deliver accurate and consistent treatment outcomes.
AI captures real-time image data and analyzes it based on the same rules every time to provide you with:
As mentioned earlier, what is clear to you in a dental x-ray is likely not so obvious to your patient. With a click, AI can simplify image data for a more patient-friendly view, using color, labels, numbers, and easily understood language to clarify what is essential to your diagnosis and help you present it to your patient.
Check out the following resources for more insight into the synergy between AI, dental imagery, and dentistry in general:
Pearl is a global dental AI leader assisting dentists across six continents with robust clinical pathology detection.
Get acquainted with Pearl and our Second Opinion technology here.
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Curious how AI can benefit your dental practice and/or interface with your dental imaging technology?
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