Concepts of dental informatics and machine learning in oral health care

Dental informatics is a sub-discipline of biomedical informatics and is the implementation of information science to improve practice of dentistry, research, education and management. This is an interdisciplinary field which applies knowledge and techniques from other disciplines such as information science, computer science, cognitive science and telecommunications. Image processing, digital imaging, computerized patient history records, clinical decision support and teledentistry are some popular research topics in dental informatics. It is a new field that supports patient care bridging the gap between researchers and clinicians. This field utilizes information science and it’s applications to help practitioners utilize recent advances and discuss about cases with diagnostic dilemma (evidence based dentistry). The advances made in the field of machine learning and data mining has equipped researchers with newfound approaches to tackling traditional challenges like diagnosis and risk assessment. If a sufficiently large dataset is available to train the machine learning models, then we can build a fairly accurate classifier. The collection of this data is one of the initial challenges and hence maintaining electronic oral health records, pooling of genetic data globally will help create a large database that can be used to effectively predict the diagnosis and prognosis of specific diseases. However awareness and usage of these alternate approaches is low due to lack of relevant insights among the practicing dental community. This article aims to bridge this gap and highlight the concepts of dental informatics, machine learning and its applications in oral health care.