Is Artificial Intelligence the future of Dental Radiology?

The integration of AI is anticipated to bring a major transformation to the quality, value, and impact of radiology on patient care and population health, as well as radiologists' workflows, over the next decade.AI technologies are already being applied across various dental specialties, including orthodontics.There are various applications of AI in Oral and Maxillofacial Radiology.AI is expected to ease the daily workload of physicians and reduce the incidence of misdiagnosis or underdiagnosis in dental practice.Although AI systems are a valuable resource in both dentistry and dental education, it's crucial to recognize that these technological advancements stem from human innovation and discovery.The ability of a machine to mimic intelligent human behaviors to perform complicated tasks like problem-solving, object and word recognition, and decision-making is known as artificial intelligence or AI [1,2].AI has gained popularity recently in several areas, including dentistry, where its uses in oral and maxillofacial imaging show significant promise.Because radiology creates digitally coded images, integrating AI into medical procedures is much simpler [3].Convolutional neural networks, which are capable of handling tasks including image categorization, detection, segmentation, registration, creation, and refinement, are the main focus of recent studies in oral and maxillofacial radiology [4].In this field, artificial intelligence systems have been developed for image analysis, forensic dentistry, radiography diagnosis, and picture quality enhancement [4].However, obtaining useful results necessitates large data sets, and oral and maxillofacial radiologists play a critical role in creating reliable and consistent datasets, which can take a lot of time.The use of AI is expected to bring about a dramatic revolution in the next ten years regarding the workflows of radiologists and the impact of radiology on population health and patient care.Dentists need to use their skills to evaluate patients, choose the best course of treatment, and make clinically sound prognostic judgments.They might, however, occasionally lack the expertise needed to act swiftly and decisively in clinical decisions.Applications of AI can be useful tools for improving performance and decision-making.AI is already being used in several dental specializations, such as orthodontics.The majority of current research focuses on artificial intelligence (AI) models that use artificial neural networks (ANNs) and convolutional neural networks (CNNs) [5].AI developments are anticipated to lessen the everyday burden on healthcare professionals and lower the number of dental misdiagnoses and underdiagnoses.Radiological image research encompasses tasks such as segmenting and classifying teeth, automatically labeling anatomical structures, performing cephalometric analysis, detecting early dental diseases and periodontal conditions, and using jaw radiographs to diagnose specific diseases like osteoporosis [6].