Nightmare fuel? Maybe – but in a historic moment for the dental profession, an AI-controlled autonomous robot has performed an entire procedure on a human patient for the first time, about eight times faster than a human dentist could do it.
The system, built by Boston company Perceptive, uses a hand-held 3D volumetric scanner, which builds a detailed 3D model of the mouth, including the teeth, gums and even nerves under the tooth surface, using optical coherence tomography, or OCT. Here’s an example: [https://youtu.be/KMBD8fuUPdE]
This cuts harmful X-Ray radiation out of the process, as OCT uses nothing more than light beams to build its volumetric models, which come out at high resolution, with cavities automatically detected at an accuracy rate around 90%.
At this point, the (human) dentist and patient can discuss what needs doing – but once those decisions are made, the robotic dental surgeon takes over. It plans out the operation, then jolly well goes ahead and does it.
Source: Fully-automatic robot dentist performs world’s first human procedure / New Atlas