Can artificial intelligence make a meaningful contribution to oral healthcare?
Artificial intelligence provides many possibilities for gaining new insights into the functioning of the oral ecosystem. The success of artificial intelligence is based on a combination of an abundance of available data, greatly increased computing powers and the development of complex machine learning algorithms. These algorithms map biological patterns on the basis of data, without being explicitly programmed, i.e. the computer recognises interactions using data only. Artificial intelligence and machine learning can be used very effectively to make predictions about specific biomarkers or groups of biomarkers that can be associated with specific clinical conditions. Such insights into the complex biological processes cannot be achieved with classical p-value-based statistics.