The validity of machine learning procedures in orthodontics: what is still missing?

Artificial intelligence (AI) models and procedures hold remarkable predictive efficiency in the medical domain through their ability to discover hidden, non-obvious clinical patterns in data. However, due to the sparsity, noise, and time-dependency of medical data, AI procedures are raising unprecedented issues related to the mismatch between doctors’ mentalreasoning and the statistical answers provided by algorithms. Electronic systems can reproduce or even amplify noise hidden in the data, especially when the diagnosis of the subjects in the training data set is inaccurate or incomplete. In this paper we describe the conditions that need to be met for AI instruments to be truly useful in the orthodontic domain. We report some examples of computational procedures that are capable of extracting orthodontic knowledge through ever deeper patient representation. To have confidence in these procedures, orthodontic practitioners should recognize the benefits, shortcomings, and unintended consequences of AI models, as algorithms that learn from human decisions likewise learn mistakes and biases.