ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE ENHANCING ORTHODONTIC DIAGNOSIS AND TREATMENT

Artificial intelligence (AI) transforms orthodontics by improving diagnostic accuracy, treatment planning, and patient monitoring. AI-based cephalometric analysis achieves 88–92% reliability, reducing human error and time consumption. In radiology, AI accounts for 85% of FDA-approved medical imaging programs, with diagnostic tools like Diagnocat reaching 92.8% precision in periapical lesion detection on CBCT. Caries and radiolucency detection AI systems report 68% to 99.2% accuracy. For skeletal age determination, AI’s accuracy exceeds 90% for wrist radiographs, while cervical vertebral maturation (CVM) analysis shows variability (58–90%). AI-driven TMJ evaluation achieves sensitivity and specificity rates of 84–99.9%, enhancing osteoarthritis diagnosis. For extraction decisions, AI agrees with specialists over 80% of the time, with models reaching 93% accuracy in distinguishing extraction cases and 94% in predicting treatment needs. AI requires human oversight due to dataset limitations, algorithm unpredictability, and ethical concerns. Future developments should refine AI algorithms and improve dataset diversity to enhance clinical integration.