7 Tips for Python Beginners

Using Artificial Intelligence In The Healthcare Space

Functional Medicine Expert, Dr. Cathleen Gerenger, and the CEO of My Wellness Reader, Gary Kiss, joined Gayle Guyardo, the host of the global health and wellness show, Bloom, to share more about how Artificial Intelligence is being used in the healthcare space and reshaping the landscape.

You can watch Bloom in the Tampa Bay Market weekdays at 2pm on WFLA News Channel 8.

Bloom is now part of DBTV Network, seen in over 300 million households worldwide, including Roku TV, and Amazon Fire.

Bloom also airs in 40 markets across the country, with a reach of approximately 36 million households, and in Puerto Rico, U.S. Virgin Islands and Madison, WI.

AI In Dentistry: Researchers Find That Artificial Intelligence Can Create Better Dental Crowns

Dr. Marc Siegel explains how artificial intelligence could be helpful in doctors' offices

SHARE

SHARE

TWEET

SHARE

EMAIL

Click to expand

UP NEXT

Artificial intelligence is taking on an ever-widening role in the health and wellness space, assisting with everything from cancer detection to medical documentation. Soon, AI could make it easier for dentists to give patients a more natural, functional smile.

Researchers from the University of Hong Kong recently developed an AI algorithm that uses 3D machine learning to design personalized dental crowns with a higher degree of accuracy than traditional methods, according to a press release from the university.

The AI analyzes data from the teeth adjacent to the crown to ensure a more natural, precise fit than the crowns created using today's methods, the researchers said.

THESE ARE THE WORST DENTAL MISTAKES YOU CAN MAKE FOR YOUR TEETH

The results of the study were published in the journal Dental Materials.

A dental crown is a tooth-shaped cap that is placed over an existing tooth or implant to create the look of a natural tooth, according to the American Dental Association (ADA) website. 

READ ON THE FOX NEWS APP

© iStock Researchers from the University of Hong Kong recently developed an AI algorithm that uses 3D machine learning (not shown) to design personalized dental crowns with a higher degree of accuracy than traditional methods. IStock

A crown is typically used to improve the appearance and function of a damaged, misshapen, weakened or discolored tooth, or to replace a missing tooth when used with an artificial implant.

Currently, most dental crowns are made using computer-assisted design (CAD) and computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) software. 

While this process is a marked improvement over the traditional method of creating crowns, it still has limitations, the release stated.

NEW AI 'CANCER CHATBOT' PROVIDES PATIENTS AND FAMILIES WITH 24/7 SUPPORT: 'EMPATHETIC APPROACH'

The software uses a "tooth library" that contains templates of crowns, but they still need to be manually adjusted to fit each individual patient's needs.

"The two existing methods of designing dental crowns result in crowns that are either too large or too thin, and fall short of matching the same lifespan as natural teeth," according to the press release.

In the Hong Kong study, the researchers used 3D machine learning technology to "teach" the AI algorithm over 600 cases of natural and healthy dental results, said Dr. Hao Ding, a co-investigator on the project, in the press release. 

© iStock Currently, most dental crowns are created using computer-assisted design (CAD) and computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) software. IStock

"During the training process, natural teeth's morphological features were learned by the algorithm, so that it can design dental crowns comparable to a natural tooth — both morphologically and functionally," he added.

When the researchers compared the AI-designed crowns to the crowns that were created using CAD/CAM methods, the AI versions were found to be superior, both aesthetically and functionally. 

AI TOOL GIVES DOCTORS PERSONALIZED ALZHEIMER'S TREATMENT PLANS FOR DEMENTIA PATIENTS

"This demonstrates that 3D-DCGAN (3D-Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Network) could be utilized to design personalized dental crowns with high accuracy that can not only mimic both the morphology and biomechanics of natural teeth, but also operate without any additional human fine-tuning, thus saving additional costs in the production process," said principal investigator Dr. James Tsoi in the press release.

"Many AI approaches design a 'lookalike' product, but I believe this is the first project that functionalizes data-driven AI into [a] real dental application," he also said. 

AI TOOL HELPS DOCTORS MAKE SENSE OF CHAOTIC PATIENT DATA AND IDENTIFY DISEASES: 'MORE MEANINGFUL' INTERACTION

Clinical trials have already begun for using generative AI to create dental crowns. The team hopes to leverage the technology to create dentures and bridges in the future.

Fox News Digital reached out to the research team for comment.

Tejas Patel, owner of Austin Cosmetic Dentistry in Texas, was not involved in the University of Hong Kong study but reviewed its findings.

© iStock "Creating artificial teeth like dentures and crowns requires quite a bit of time for individual patients," one dental professional (not pictured) told Fox News Digital. "This means a higher cost and more room for error." iStock

"I have used CAM technology to produce crowns for patients in the past," he told Fox News Digital. "Creating artificial teeth like dentures and crowns requires quite a bit of time for individual patients. This means a higher cost and more room for error."

The idea of using generative AI to create "near-perfect" crowns could save time and money, Patel predicted.

"With the use of generative AI, these processes can more accurately create personalized crowns using previous data and mold them with enough precision to last almost as long as real teeth," he said.

DENTISTS REVEAL WHY YOU SHOULDN'T BRUSH YOUR TEETH IN THE SHOWER

Additionally, using generative AI in dentistry could allow patients to better maintain their oral health just by taking photos of their teeth, Patel said.

"Dentists can easily upload patient images to diagnose any illnesses," he said. 

However, with the need to perform clinical trials, it could be quite some time before this technology is available in the U.S., Patel pointed out.

"Other researchers might pick it up sooner, but patients will only see the benefits by next year or a bit later," he predicted.

Privacy risks could also be a concern, Patel warned.

"Generative AI uses a database of accumulated patient data, and this data could be breached if the necessary cybersecurity steps are not taken," he said.

Another potential disadvantage of AI in dentistry is that dental technician jobs might be lost, noted Fatima Khan, dentist and co-founder at Riven Oral Care in Houston, Texas. 

"Dental technicians who have perfected their craft and have a keen eye for aesthetics have higher lab fees," explained Khan, who was not involved in the Hong Kong study. 

"Over time, as more cases are entered into the dental library, they may become superior to those of an individual lab technician due to the amount of data being analyzed and perfected."

CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP FOR OUR HEALTH NEWSLETTER

The other downfall, Khan noted, is that dentists and technicians will become more dependent on equipment, which could potentially malfunction.

A New Antibiotic, Discovered With Artificial Intelligence, May Defeat A Dangerous Superbug

Using artificial intelligence, researchers say, they've found a new type of antibiotic that works against a particularly menacing drug-resistant bacteria.

When they tested the antibiotic on the skin of mice that were experimentally infected with the superbug, it controlled the growth of the bacteria, suggesting that the method could be used to create antibiotics tailored to fight other drug-resistant pathogens.

The researchers also tested the antibiotic against 41 different strains of antibiotic-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii. The drug worked on all of them, though it would need to be further refined and tested in human clinical trials before it could be used in patients.

What's more, the compound identified by AI worked in a way that stymied only the problem pathogen. It didn't seem to kill the many other species of beneficial bacteria that live in the gut or on the skin, making it a rare narrowly targeted agent.

If more antibiotics worked this precisely, the researchers said, it could prevent bacteria from becoming resistant in the first place.

The study was published in the journal Nature Chemical Biology.

"It's incredibly promising," said Dr. Cesar de la Fuente, an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Perlman School of Medicine who is also using AI to find new treatments but was not involved in the new research.

De la Fuente says this type of approach to finding new drugs is an emerging field that researchers have been testing since about 2018. It dramatically cuts the time it takes to sort through thousands of promising compounds.

"I think AI, as we've seen, can be applied successfully in many domains, and I think drug discovery is sort of the next frontier."

For the study, researchers focused on the bacteria Actinetobacter baumanii. It hangs out in hospitals and other health care settings, clinging to surfaces like doorknobs and counters. Because it is able to grab bits of DNA from other organisms it comes into contact with, it can incorporate their best weapons: genes that help them resist agents doctors use to treat them.

"It's what we call in the laboratory a professional pathogen," said Jon Stokes, one of the researchers and an assistant professor of biochemistry and biomedical sciences at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.

This species causes difficult-to-treat skin, blood or respiratory infections. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in 2019 that Acinetobacter baumanii infections were "of greatest need" for new types of antibiotics to treat them.

A recent study of hospital patients with Actinetobacter baumanii infections that were resistant even to powerful carbapenem antibiotics found that 1 in 4 had died within a month of their diagnosis.

For the new study, Stokes and lab teamed up with researchers from the Broad Institute at MIT and Harvard. First, they used a technique called high-throughput drug screening to grow Acinetobacter baumanii in lab dishes and spent weeks exposing these colonies to more than 7,500 agents: drugs and the active ingredients of drugs. They found 480 compounds that blocked the growth of the bacteria.

They fed that information into a computer and used it to train an artificial intelligence algorithm.

"Once we had our model trained, what we could do then is start showing that model brand-new pictures of chemicals that it had never seen, right? And based on what it had learned during training, it would predict for us whether those molecules were antibacterial or not," Stokes said.

They then had the model screen more than 6,000 molecules, which Stokes said the AI was able to do over the course of a few hours.

They narrowed the search to 240 chemicals, which they tested in the lab. The lab testing helped them whittle the list to nine of the best inhibitors of the bacteria. From there, they took a closer look at the structure of each one, eliminating those they thought might be dangerous or related to known antibiotics.

They were left with one compound, called RS102895, which Stokes thinks had been originally developed as a potential treatment for diabetes.

He says it appears to work in a completely new way, by preventing components of the bacteria from traveling from inside the cell to its surface.

"It's a rather interesting mechanism and one that is not observed amongst clinical antibiotics so far as I know," he said.

What's more, he said, RS102895 – which the researchers renamed abaucin – works only on Actinetobacter baumanii.

Stokes says most antibiotics are broad-spectrum agents, working against many species of bacteria. Broad-spectrum antibiotics put a lot of selection pressure on many types of bacteria, causing many to quickly evolve, and share, genes that help them resist the drug and survive.

"With this molecule, because it only works very potently against Actinetobacter, it doesn't impose that universal selective pressure, so it's not going to spread resistance quite as quick," he said.

For more CNN news and newsletters create an account at CNN.Com

---