Nordblom N F, Büttner M, Schwendicke F. Artificial Intelligence in Orthodontics: Critical Review. J Dent Res 2024; DOI: 10.1177/00220345241235606.

AI may help orthodontists with treatment decisions, such as needing orthognathic surgery or tooth extractions.

With increasing digitalisation in orthodontics, certain processes such as the fabrication of indirect bonding trays, aligner production, or wire bending can be automated. As the prediction of growth in orthodontic patients and response to orthodontic treatment is inherently complex and individual, orthodontists use features gathered from longitudinal, multimodal, and standardised orthodontic data sets. Orthodontists use these data sets to make informed, rule-based treatment decisions. Artificial intelligence (AI) has been successfully applied to assist orthodontists with extracting relevant data from such data sets. AI has been applied to analyse clinical imagery, intraoral scans and photographic data. In research, AI is applied to help orthodontists with decision support for treatment decisions, such as the need for orthognathic surgery or tooth extractions. One major challenge in current AI research in orthodontics is the limited generalisability. Comparing AI across different studies and tasks is virtually impossible as both outcomes and metrics vary widely, and underlying data sets are not standardised. Only a few AI applications in orthodontics have reached full clinical maturity and regulatory approval.