Developments, application, and performance of artificial intelligence in dentistry - A systematic review

Background/purpose: Artificial intelligence (AI) has made deep inroads into dentistry in the last few years. The aim of this systematic review was to identify the development of AI applications that are widely employed in dentistry and evaluate their performance in terms of diagnosis, clinical decision-making, and predicting the prognosis of the treatment. Materials and methods: The literature for this paper was identified and selected by perform-ing a thorough search in the electronic data bases like PubMed, Medline, Embase, Cochrane, Google scholar, Scopus, Web of science, and Saudi digital library published over the past two decades (January 2000eMarch 15, 2020).After applying inclusion and exclusion criteria, 43 articles were read in full and critically analyzed. Quality analysis was performed using QUA-DAS-2. Results: AI technologies are widely implemented in a wide range of dentistry specialties. Most of the documented work is focused on AI models that rely on convolutional neural net-works (CNNs) and artificial neural networks (ANNs). These AI models have been used in detec-tion and diagnosis of dental caries, vertical root fractures, apical lesions, salivary gland diseases, maxillary sinusitis, maxillofacial cysts, cervical lymph nodes metastasis, osteopo-rosis, cancerous lesions, alveolar bone loss, predicting orthodontic extractions, need for or-thodontic treatments, cephalometric analysis, age and gender determination. Conclusion: These studies indicate that the performance of an AI based automated system is excellent. They mimic the precision and accuracy of trained specialists, in some studies it was found that these systems were even able to outmatch dental specialists in terms of per-formance and accuracy. (C) 2020 Association for Dental Sciences of the Republic of China. Publishing services by Else-vier B.V.