Transcriber: Jessica Samuelson Reviewer: Emma G
I’m about to tell you why the revolution of AI in health care
will start with your mouth.
And it all starts with something
we all do hopefully every six months:
a visit to your dentist.
And while many of you might not like visiting the dentist,
because you are afraid of needles or do not trust the dentist
or, like myself, a self-conscious of your flossing behavior,
what if I told you that improving your overall oral health
or your oral health is the best way to improve your overall health?
When I was at MIT, I conducted extensive research
in the intersection of AI, health care and oral health.
And what became more and more clear is that oral diseases are highly correlated
and to some extent even cause most significant health diseases
such as hypertension, diabetes or early onset dementia.
For instance, if you have periodontal disease,
that is recession of your gums,
it is very likely to 30 to 70% that you also have high blood pressure.
It’s extremely important to identify these dental diseases early on
and intervene early on to reduce your overall health risks.
So dental health is health care.
But if you look right now to the left and to the right of your neighbor,
then I can tell you that half of you have an undiagnosed and untreated cavity.
And two thirds of us here in the room have periodontal disease,
which actually has this correlation to hypertension.
So we all seem young, but we are not as healthy as we might think.
But I don't want to scare you.
In fact, I actually want to show you that the particular domain of dentistry,
as well as the revolution of AI together,
will improve our overall health significantly.
First, dentistry.
Dentists are not only dentists, they are primary care physicians,
they are surgeons, they are radiologists and overall, they’re business owners.
And they continuously get scolded for being inaccurate.
There's a famous Reader's Digest study which shows that if you go to 50 dentists,
you will get 50 different opinions, diagnosis and treatment plans.
And many of us have made experiences in that.
And so that doesn't necessarily increase the trust in it.
But it's not that they are incompetent.
It has much more to do with one of the major diagnostic tools in dentistry,
which are these old fashioned greyscale X-rays.
And a quick Google search shows
that an X-ray can have 64,000 shades of grey
and our eyes can actually identify 900 of those.
Secondly, dentists different than almost every other health care profession,
they work in isolation, they’re alone.
They do the diagnosis and the treatment plan by themselves.
And third, they constantly context switch from all these four different jobs.
So it’s extremely hard for them to actually every day
and every hour of the day to have the top performance.
So at this point, you might not be surprised
that dentistry has actually one of the highest diagnostic errors in health care.
So what does it mean, though, for you?
That means that if you go to the dentist,
they might take an X-ray such as this one.
And on first glimpse, it looks healthy.
And on a second glimpse, she or he, the dentist, might identify
these two regions of concern
which might be able to fix by getting as simple as a filling.
And again, it is extremely important to get these filings early on
to stop the progression of disease,
which then can lead to more significant treatments such as root canals,
and then also to more significant health risks such as diabetes and hypertension.
But in a hectic day, while the dentist might identify these areas of concern,
he or she might also miss all of these.
And so that doesn’t help anyone, right?
But there’s hope, dentists are data driven.
They are technology enthusiasts and they constantly want to improve.
In fact, they have shown this in the past decades
with two major evolutions: one is digital radiography.
They use new digital sensors,
which already significantly improved to identify diseases earlier.
The second one are intraoral sensors.
Intraoral cameras enable the patient to see what’s going on in their mouth
and increases the trust between the dentists and the patient.
And now dentistry is ready for the third revolution,
which is artificial intelligence,
which in fact will actually increase accuracy
as well as the trust between dentists and patients.
But before diving into this, let’s look into AI in health care in general.
So AI in health care has been around for a long time
and to be honest, often overhyped.
There have been numerous reports which said,
“Oh, the end of radiology is there
and radiologists will not find a job going forward.”
Well, I checked last week and right now
the median salary for radiologists is $300,000
and there are over 9% increase of job openings.
So to me, they seem to do fine.
So why is it that the AI adoption in health care
takes much longer than we predicted?
Well, there are numerous reasons,
but three of them are the following.
First, radiologists are not really incentivized to adopt AI.
In the end, they are compensated by reading X-rays.
Second, they’re actually pretty good on what they’re doing.
They work with other radiologists
and every day have what they call a radiology conference
where they go over the most difficult cases.
They have, so to say, a peer reviewed feedback loop and constantly improve.
And the third aspect is that also the technology AI has its challenges.
It is hard to obtain data in health care
and thus algorithms which have been built mainly on isolated datasets
such as at Stanford University,
when deployed here across the bridge at Harvard Medical School,
they all of a sudden dropped in accuracy by over 20%
So that has a huge issue in terms of fairness
and generalizability of AI.
In dentistry, it is quite different.
Dentists do not get paid for reading radiographs,
but instead they get paid for doing
the appropriate treatment at the right time.
Secondly, they work in isolation.
For them having an assisted AI tool,
it would actually make all the sense in the world to improve over time.
And third, my company VideaHealth was able to build
our algorithms not on one isolated data set,
but instead using data from hundreds of dentists across the United States.
That enables us actually to build
the most fair and generalizable algorithms in health care.
So let’s put this to the test, right?
How can we compare the adoption of AI in health care and dentistry?
And one tool we can use is the Gartner Hype Cycle.
Gartner is a company which dedicated its research to understanding
how innovative technologies get adopted by the market.
And now every technology let it be autonomous driving
or AI in dentistry or radiology goes to this hype cycle.
From an initial hype to high expectations
to a valley of disillusionment to then the actual adoption in production.
And what you can see here in the red box is that computer vision and AI
and radiology is closed before actually getting adopted.
The thing, though, is that it took AI and radiology over ten years
to go from the beginning of this hype cycle not even close to the adoption.
What I’ve experienced in the last three years since founding VideaHealth,
that dentistry blasted through this hype cycle in the last three years.
So again, what took AI and radiology over ten years,
we’re already after three years at the same point.
And this is also why extrapolating this to the future,
the AI revolution will be led by dentistry.
So what does that actually mean for your next dentist visit,
which you should go to,
it means that your dentist will be powered by AI,
and instead of getting ten different diagnosis and treatment plans,
you will obtain a much more accurate treatment plan and diagnosis much earlier.
In fact, we can show this that in our FDA studies,
we were able to reduce the missed cavities by 43%,
while at the same time reduce the error by an additional 15%
So what does that mean for the future?
The future envision a world where you go to the dentist
and all major diseases such as cavities, restorative disease,
periodontal disease and daunting diseases
such as root canals will be powered by AI
identified much more accurately and also much earlier.
One of our studies have actually shown
that we can identify cavities five years
before the dentist identifies the cavity.
Imagine a future where AI not only shows you what you have right now,
but also predicts into the future
what happens if you get treatment A, B, or C?
Imagine a future where you go to the dentist,
not only because of cosmetic reasons
or because it’s something we do every six months,
but instead you see an opportunity to increase your overall health
and reduce the risks of hypertension, diabetes and even Alzheimer.
AI in dentistry will not only increase your oral health,
but also reduce the overall health burden of society.
And since dentistry is so ingrained in our everyday life,
this technology will enable to support and improve
the health of hundreds of millions of patients in US and billions globally.
Thank you. (Applause)