Dental crowns made by AI
Researchers say that crowns made by AI are more "like a natural tooth" than crowns made by current methods.
AI is becoming increasingly important in health and fitness, helping with everything from finding cancer to keeping track of medical records. Soon, AI could help dentists give their patients smiles that look more realistic and work better.
A news release from the University of Hong Kong says that researchers have recently made an AI algorithm that uses 3D machine learning to make personalised dental crowns more accurately than traditional methods.
Researchers say the AI looks at data from the teeth next to the crown to ensure it fits more naturally and precisely than crowns made using current methods.
The study's results were written up in a magazine called Dental Materials.
The American Dental Association (ADA) website says a dental crown is a tooth-shaped cap put over a real tooth or an implant to make it look like a natural tooth.
A crown is usually used to improve the look and function of a tooth that is broken, distorted, weak, or stained. It can also replace a lost tooth with an artificial implant.
Software called computer-aided design (CAD) and computer-aided production (CAM) are used to make most dental crowns today.
The report said that even though this method is a big improvement over the old way of making crowns, it still has some problems.
The software has a "tooth library" with crown templates, but they must still be changed by hand to fit each patient's needs.
"The two ways that dental crowns are made now result in crowns that are either too big or too thin and don't last as long as natural teeth," says the news release.
In the Hong Kong study, researchers used 3D machine learning to "teach" the AI programme over 600 cases of natural and healthy dental results, said Dr Hao Ding, a co-investigator on the project, in a press release.
"During the training process, the algorithm learned the shape of natural teeth, so it can design dental crowns that look and work like natural teeth," he said.
When the researchers looked at the AI-designed crowns and the CAD/CAM-designed crowns, they found that the AI-designed crowns were better in both looks and function.
"This shows that 3D-DCGAN (3D-Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Network) could be used to design personalised dental crowns with high accuracy that can not only mimic the shape and biomechanics of natural teeth but also work without any additional fine-tuning by a human, saving money in the production process," said principal investigator Dr James Tsoi in a press release.
"Many AI approaches to create a product that "looks like" something else, but I think this is the first project that turns data-driven AI into a real dental application," he added.
Using generative AI to make tooth crowns has already started to be tested in the real world. The team wants to use the technology to make dentures and bridges.