Dental AI

The state of our teeth affects our overall health and the NHS spends over £3.6 billion annually to provide dental care. Dental radiography (X-ray imaging) is an essential tool for diagnosing dental diseases such as caries (tooth decay) and bone loss (gum disease). 46 million dental X-rays are taken in the UK each year. However, error rates in interpreting the X-rays by dentists are over 50%, due to subtlety of abnormalities, varying image qualities and viewing conditions, dentists’ expertise and fatigue factors. Identifying early disease is particularly error-prone but is critical to allowing us to keep our own teeth into later life. An automated solution to assist dentists to identify abnormalities on X-rays, improving detection accuracy and reducing unnecessary economic and human costs is therefore urgently needed.

In 2020, a Dental Radiograph Collection, Annotation, and Prediction System (DR CAPS) was being developed to provide a one-stop solution to facilitate the collection and annotation of dental radiographs and use an embedded Artificial Intelligence (AI) model to predict disease on X-rays assist diagnosis.

This AI Centre project builds on our initial proof-of-concept research and aims to advance and evaluate DR CAPS, and demonstrate its clinical acceptability for eventual NHS use.