Artificial intelligence, virtual reality and robotics are becoming some of the most innovative technologies in dentistry, and leaders are looking ahead at their potential.
Three dental executives recently joined Becker’s “Dental + DSO Virtual Event” to discuss these technologies and their evolution.
Editor’s note: Responses were lightly edited for length and clarity.
Question: How do you see dental technology evolving over the next five years?
Marci Levine, DMD, MD, Clinical Associate Professor at New York University College of Dentistry (New York City): I think the technologies will continue to get better and better. In the near future, it will be very much a part of a patient’s understanding of what a dentist is able to do. For so long, dentistry has been thought of as being rather routine, rather based on a practitioner’s comfort level. Being in the educational space, I’m often encountering people who are at a dental school for a variety of reasons, and typically practice because this is the way it’s always worked for them … dentists tend to become comfortable, and things that have worked for them tend to become part of their everyday repertoire. It can be challenging to bring in new technology, and I find this conversation especially exciting because we see how dentistry is going leaps and bounds beyond other areas, and I think it naturally lends itself toward technology.
So much of dentistry is tactile. There’s certainly an element of getting your hands wet for students to practice before they engage in patient care, and I think we’re able to provide a near-life experience. It’s not perfect, and it’s still being revised, but I think over the next several years, patients will come to expect the use of advanced technology in their dental care. They will expect the practitioner to be well versed, and I think the level of expectation of the outcome will change. It will be very interesting to see how this continues to evolve as students learn and grow this way, and patients become much more familiar with what a dentist knows or can do from training.
Sundeep Rawal, DMD. Senior Vice President of Implant Support Services at Aspen Dental (Chicago): Dentistry will look nothing like it does today. There’s no other way of saying it. How we have adopted these technologies and how we’ve created use cases for these technologies — it’s just the tip of the iceberg. I think everything we do in dentistry will be touched in some way, shape or form by AI, either on the front end, on the patient-facing [and] provider-facing side of it, [or] in the back end, on the business side of dentistry. AI will pervade everything we do. When it comes to clinical care, AI is going to change how we think about design work. It’s going to obviously impact manufacturing [and] diagnostics, and so what it really means is that the dental office of tomorrow will look nothing like the dental office of today.
What you’ll see is really a complete change in the delivery of care model that we are accustomed to. When you think about what happens in the office — a patient comes in, and there’s a procedure to come up with a diagnosis, treatment plans are formulated, and then therapy is executed — a lot of that is going to be condensed. It’s going to become very standardized. Patients will expect this level of fidelity in their oral healthcare. From a provider standpoint, it’s going to really change how we’re able to deliver care, because what will happen is you’ll be able to come in and in a very short order, come up with a predictable plan that will lead to predictable outcomes based on data. Then, when you start to execute that therapy, things will happen in very short order, meaning you’ll have things like real time, actionable things that will allow you to deliver care effectively on the spot … When a patient comes to the office, the experience will be more predictable, diagnosis and treatment plans will become standardized or more objective [and] based on data that provides more predictable outcomes, decision-making will be rapid, and then on top of that, execution of care, in many respects, will become, for lack of a better word, instantaneous. Patients will be able to get the care they need in an almost instantaneous fashion, no different than where the rest of society is going.
Geith Kallas, DDS. Founder of Smile Makers Dental Center (Virginia): This technology is changing rapidly and is making dentistry more predictable and more fun to practice. I’ve been in the dental field for over 30 years. When AI analysis for X-rays started, it [detected] six dental conditions. Today, some of the companies have more than 30. Within three years that happened, and now the CBCTs are getting analyzed too for over 60 conditions. Can you imagine how this is affecting patients? You treat [issues] for a much better outcome. I think patients within five years will expect to go to a dental office and see all of those technologies, from AI analysis to digital scanning, to even same-day dentistry. [On the other side] with operations, you get the reporting, you get the KPIs, you get the insurance filing [and] EOPs analyzed, so it’s all a combination. It’s changing the world of dentistry to a really different level.
Q: What’s a specific piece of technology you’re excited to adopt in the next two to three years?
ML: We’re currently investigating the addition of haptic technology. As the systems become more refined, the expectation is that virtual reality will be available outside of a laboratory and readily available for anyone. Not only will students benefit greatly from this advanced technology, but I also think older dentists who want to advance their skills or refine their abilities to perform procedures that maybe they weren’t educated on in dental school will have the opportunity for continuing education and further refinement by using advanced technology on their personal devices, and in a way that’s extremely user friendly. I think the sky’s the limit, and it’s really exciting to be in dentistry now because I look back on my own education 25 years ago, and I see what [students’] opportunities look like. It’s just exciting because it continues to grow and evolve, and I think time will tell where we end up.
SR: We’re really keen on AI obviously. AI is just changing everything we do and society in general. Another keen area we’re focused on is 3D printing. I think today, 3D printing is probably changing the manufacturing aspects of dentistry, very similar to how CAD/CAM changed the world of waxing and casting a couple of decades ago, but it’s changing manufacturing at 10 times the rate of change … what’s really exciting about that is it unlocks the ability to deliver care quite differently in a matter of minutes on site. We’re going to [quickly] approach a world where probably 85-90% of anything that’s ever delivered in the mouth is 3D printed in the office. There’s so much that’s changing with the 3D printing space that we’re acutely focused on.
The last part is automation in the mouth. I think robotics is something that we’re just kind of touching the surface of, specific to being able to execute care. When you think about prepping a tooth, doing a surgical procedure [or] placing an implant, robotics will change dramatically as well. Those are probably the three big areas we’re looking at. We’re going to continue to focus on those areas over the coming years to make sure we’re staying at the forefront of technology.
GK: Although AI shows you conditions, I imagine if we can get AI to show us, if we do not treat those conditions, what happens? So, how that decay is going to grow and how it’s going to get in the nerves and [become an] infection. Or, if you do not replace that missing tooth with an implant, what’s going to happen? If you do not do the orthodontic treatment, how the traumatic occlusion will start affecting the bite, the muscles [and] the body.
