Artificial Intelligence in Dentistry: from the Basics to Clinical Practice

Use AI tools to enhance daily clinical practice

• Design effective prompts for differential diagnosis, treatment planning and patient communication.
• Apply advanced prompting techniques, including role-playing, few-shot learning and chain-of-thought reasoning.
• Manage long and contextual conversations with LLMs while maintaining clinical coherence.
• Build specialised knowledge bases using RAG systems and NotebookLM.
• Use automatic transcription tools to structure clinical appointments.
• Apply specialised tools for efficient literature searching.
• Use AI for the automated generation of clinical reports, consent forms and patient communications.

Understand current applications of AI in dentistry

• Identify the main applications of AI for dental image analysis, including radiology, clinical photography and intraoral scanning.
• Understand the current state of research into AI applied to different dental specialties.
• Understand the concept of RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) and its advantages over generic LLMs.
• Understand the main AI platforms in healthcare and their medical applications.
• Identify applications of AI in digital planning and computer-aided design.

Understand the technical foundations of artificial intelligence

• Differentiate between symbolic AI (rule-based) and non-symbolic AI (machine learning).
• Explain the basic functioning of neural networks and their application in dentistry.
• Understand the essential concepts underlying LLMs, including how they function, their limitations (hallucinations, knowledge cut-off points) and potential biases.
• Understand how data quality and data labelling affect the performance of AI models.
• Recognise biases in datasets and understand their clinical implications.

Adopt a critical and responsible approach to AI

• Critically evaluate AI-generated responses before applying them in a clinical setting.
• Recognise the limitations of AI tools and complement their use with professional clinical judgement.
• Validate AI-generated imaging results using appropriate clinical criteria.
• Understand the legal and privacy implications (GDPR) of using AI with patient data.
• Maintain up-to-date knowledge of developments and limitations in AI applied to dentistry.