AI and ChatGPT: new study outlines role in shaping the future of dentistry

AI has promoted recent progress in digital health for many years. AI-equipped applications in dentistry have been found useful in analysing medical imaging, including diagnosing dental caries, periodontitis, and implantitis, and assisting oral and maxillofacial surgery with surgical planning. Besides the imaging data, audio data analyses can also benefit from deep-learning applications, as speech is one of the most important functions of the oral structure. Dental education is another emerging application. ChatGPT stirred up lots of interest among millions of scientists and engineers on account of its impressive human conversational response as a chatbot. However, its potential impact on revolutionising a series of technologies is more significant. The research project provides an insight into its potential use in dentistry.

The study authors suggest that ChatGPT has served as a valuable tool to assist medical education for more effective instruction and analysis of teacher-student interaction. Medical writing can be assisted or even accomplished by ChatGPT which enables efficient documentation. Furthermore, language challenges in medical research or clinical processes can be alleviated by ChatGPT.

They continue to observe that AI technology has promoted clinical applications by improving patient outcomes, streamlining processes, and reducing costs. In clinical practice, AI has achieved striking success in analysing patient data.

Equipped with a cross-modal encoder, a single large language model (LLM) can manage multi-source data and conduct advanced natural language reasoning to perform complex clinical operations. This has the potential to revolutionise dental diagnosis and treatment, which indicates a promising avenue for clinical application and research in dentistry. However, the researchers caution that challenges with AI in dentistry may include data privacy, data quality and model bias.

As technology continues to evolve, we can expect to see even more innovative applications of AI in clinical settings, ultimately leading to more effective healthcare services tailored to the needs of patients.

The study, titled “ChatGPT for shaping the future of dentistry: the potential of multi-modal large language model”, was published on 28 July in the International Journal of Oral Science.

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