Overjet has big plans to continue its innovation in the dental artificial intelligence space and build upon its success from this year.
The dental AI company most recently received FDA 501(k) clearance for its Periapical Radiolucency Assist device. The milestone makes the company the first and only dental AI provider capable of detecting and outlining instances of periapical radiolucency on radiographs for patients ages 12 and older.
Overjet CEO Wardah Inam, PhD, and Chief Dental Officer Terri Dolan, DDS, recently spoke with Becker's about the company's accomplishments and what's in store for the company in 2024.
Note: These responses were lightly edited for clarity and length.
Question: How would you describe this last year for Overjet?
Dr. Wardah Inam: It's been an exciting year for us. We've grown significantly. We've also built a lot of different products to help serve our customers effectively and learned a lot about their needs and what they value. Seeing how these technologies are now being used in practices to provide better care is definitely amazing. I think what's also been very exciting is that, not only have these groups been utilizing Overjet in their practices, but you can also see them utilize Overjet in their career fairs, in their job recommendations, et cetera, to not only attract dentists but also attract patients to their practices, signaling to them that they care about the quality of care and patient care.
Dr. Terri Dolan: When I first met Wardah and was introduced to computer vision and AI technology a few years ago, I thought, "This has such amazing potential." What's happened over the past years is we've been seeing that potential be realized and as practices are adopting the technology and taking advantage of the opportunity to have more patient-centric, accurate and consistent diagnoses, not just for common conditions like caries and periapical disease but now adding periodical radiolucencies, it really expands the capability of the technology and its ability to help the dentist do his or her job better. We've been seeing that adoption and that excitement and the value that it brings to everyday clinical practice.
Q: What would you say is Overjet's biggest accomplishment from 2023?
WI: This year, we actually started to quantify the value being delivered to our practices. There was hope, people were seeing it, it was anecdotal last year, but this year it became much more quantified in terms of the value that it delivers. That probably is our biggest achievement this year.
Q: How do the company's recent FDA clearances help it stand out from competitors?
WI: As we get these FDA clearances, it allows us to offer capabilities to our customers that our competitors don't have or cannot provide. It isn't even the number of clearances, it's also the breadth of the clearances in terms of the capabilities that we're allowed to market and provide our customers. It leads to them receiving the most amount of value from using Overjet compared to any other product out there.
TD: Just using the periapical radiolucency as the most recent example ... sometimes they are difficult to identify, and many times they get missed, even with the best-intended comprehensive assessment. Having that added ability to have a technology say, "Hey, pay attention to this particular area so that the condition is identified," and sometimes you need additional evaluation or testing, but I know it will result in improved patient care and more accurate, precise identification of these findings, which will lead to hopefully earlier detection and better treatment outcomes.
Q: How does the company decide its next move for innovation?
WI: First, our internal team looks at, where can we have the most amount of value created. Thinking about it from the patient's point of view, where can care be improved for them? Where can diagnosis be improved? Where can the quality of treatments be improved for them? Second, we really value the feedback and insights our customers provide because they're doing this day-to-day and [we enjoy] helping them solve some of the challenges they're facing. When we build anything, we then test it out with these customers and see what the value is. We might tweak things. We might go back to the drawing board and say, how can we do this better? Then we release it to everyone once we've proven there is value not only for the provider but also for the patient.
Q: How does the company plan to build on its innovation and accomplishments from this year?
WI: We are continuing to expand our machine learning capabilities of other indications that we can identify and provide. We're also looking at improving metrics for these practices where we've shown an increase in treatment acceptance rates. We've already shown an increase in production for these practices. We are also showing increases in claim reimbursement rates and [we're] doubling down on these metrics further to help these practices deliver more value to the customers, make dentists more productive and reduce the administrative overhead that dental practices face. So I think those will be some of the areas that we will be focused on in 2024.
What other trends in artificial intelligence are you following today?
WI: The biggest trend probably in 2023 was generative AI. That got the attention of consumers and [they started] to interact with AI more directly through conversation. That is an amazing trend in general, but also what it has shown is that training on significant amounts of data helps you create models and outputs, which create capabilities that we didn't even think were possible before. That's a trend we're utilizing as well and leveraging in dentistry by utilizing a significant amount of data to not only train our models but also create capabilities that dentists didn't think were possible and exceed these capabilities further.
There's also this trend of what I call multimodal models, where earlier you had vision models and models that could do text and conversations and now these are all converging into multimodal models, where whether it's text, conversation, images or other data, these models can now understand and take all these modalities to come up with the best outputs possible.
TD: As someone who's been in dentistry for many years, we've been collecting patient data for years and years, and we're finally putting it to use for the benefit of the patient in a more holistic fashion, so I think that's really exciting.