554 AI in Dental Hygiene: Tool, Threat, or Teammate?

Yeah, when I think about radiologic AI, so we're picturing pathologies being highlighted in the x-ray.

And the way you can abuse AI is, let's say Pearl or any other software displays these, and you just treatment plan them.

You see bone level alerts in that red or that orange, and oh, they need SRP.

And you're almost limiting your own clinical judgment and relying on the AI.

Whereas the AI should be surfacing these things to you and you are still going in and checking, using your education, your background to confirm those things.

So a great example would be a patient on a stable but reduced periodontium.

Picture their x-rays, their bone level alerts are going to be red, orange off the charts.

So if I were to be abusing the AI, I would see those colors come up and I would talk about periodontal disease and SRP.

If I am using AI as my roadmap, my second opinion, my assistant, I'm going to go through, I note those bone levels, but I'm going to look for active bleeding.

I'm going to compare the AI to their perio chart.

I'm going to turn the AI on and off and look in their mouth.

And so I'm adding that context to what the AI is finding and making a more holistic diagnosis rather than just treatment planning everything that displays on the screen simply because the AI picked it up.

Because the AI is not looking in the mouth.

It's not seeing the color, size, contour, shape, consistency.

It's not...

Yep.

Carries risk.

You know, there's a lot of missing context in x-rays.

Wow, who would have thought? And that's another thing, too, that I hear a lot is those bone level measurements.

I have my hygienist and they go, Katie, these probing depths are completely inaccurate.

And I go, ah...

This is hard tissue in the x-ray.

This is our bone loss.

You need to use it in conjunction with your probing depths and your perio chart.

You've got to use both.