Can you handle the tooth? AI helps dentists design fake gnashers

Artificially intelligent software has found the next industry to potentially, as the kids say, disrupt – dentistry. A team of researchers from the University of California, Berkeley and Glidewell Dental Lab have built a generative adversarial network (GAN) to automatically generate new designs of dental crowns. GANs have been …

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm confused.

One second were are on about fake teeth, the next crowns.

They are not the same thing.

A good old car anology.

Fitting a crown is like fitting a new tyre

Fitting a new tooth is like replacing the entire wheel assembly.

[Dave 126]

Re: I'm confused.

Yeah, but where this technique helps is determining the shape of the business end of the tooth, regardless of whether just a crown is being fitted or if the whole tooth is being replaced - both procedures benefit from the food-end being of an optimal shape.

[FlossyThePig]

Re: I'm confused.

My dentist constructed one of my premolars in situ. He didn't need AI, just years of dental knowledge.

[Anonymous Coward]

"The way current design means that it can only deal with single missing teeth."

My dentist fitted a gold crown for me by the traditional method of taking a mould and waiting for the lab to return the piece.

A few years later the mirror-image one needed a crown. By then he had invested in a camera that took a 3D picture of the prepared cavity. A few minutes of CAD mouse clicking and then we chatted while a suitably coloured blank was machined to the shape. It was amazing to hear the click as it fitted into place.

Given that my teeth are somewhat irregular in layout - it takes some manual skill to grind the top surface to make a comfortable fit with the existing teeth.

The surprise was when he then produced a low tech digital camera to photograph both crowns. Apparently they were perfect examples for an international conference lecture that he was to give on the new technique.