Would you let a robot prep your tooth crown?
Perceptive, a Boston-based robotics company, has unveiled a fully autonomous, AI-controlled robot able to carry out a complete dental procedure on human patients, completing the task eight times faster than its human counterpart.
The robot starts with a diagnosis, using a volumetric three-dimensional scanner that instead of an X-Ray, uses optical consistency tomography (OTC) to build a complete, high-resolution three-dimensional model of the patient’s mouth, including teeth, gums and even nerves. This automatically detects any cavity with an accuracy of 90%.
After diagnosis, the patient discusses and plans the procedure with a human dentist, but it is the robot that carries it out. Particularly long and complex procedures, such as the preparation of a tooth for the fixation of a crown, which generally last more than two hours and which dentists usually divide into a couple of visits, are carried out by the machine in about fifteen minutes, similar to how numerical control machines work.
