06
2026
-
02
Harnessing AI to address barriers in oral health care
For more than 40 years, researchers have been experimenting with ways to apply AI to dentistry, said Florian Hillen, founder and CEO of VideaHealth, a dental imaging startup launched from AI research conducted at Harvard and MIT.
Within the last decade, he said, AI capabilities have finally reached critical mass.
“AI-powered tools are now helping dentists identify dental decay in patients up to five years earlier,” he said. “The tech revolution is happening.”
Beyond opportunities to improve outcomes for individual patients, researchers are seizing AI to help solve population-level health challenges. To do so effectively, academia and industry will have to dissolve boundaries between scientific discipines, said keynote speaker Dimitrias Bertsimas of MIT.
At Harvard, cross-disciplinary teams are leveraging machine learning to identify patients whose social determinants of health put them more directly in the path of climate change-related impacts and a bevy of other risks to oral health.
“Are exposures to wildfires impacting oral health? If they become more frequent, who’s most vulnerable and how do we act on this information?” asked Francesca Dominici, director of the Harvard Data Science Initiative at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
She and a team of researchers are using AI to analyze satellite data, atmospheric chemistry models, and other factors, revealing which communities are most affected by increasingly frequent wildfires, extreme heat waves, and destructive storms.
Reduced air quality from fires and higher temperatures from warming climate can cause mouths to be drier, making people more prone to oral disease and tooth decay. Increased psychological stress from extreme weather events can increase risk for teeth grinding and temporomandibular joint (TMJ) disorders.
What’s more, natural disasters can disrupt access to dental facilities and care, Dominici added.
Key words：
Previous page
DENTAL INTRUMENT SUPPLIER
Specializing in the production of various dental instruments
SEO Powerby: www.300.cn | Privacy Policy