Not every dark circle on a dental radiograph is a lesion, and not every bright streak is disease. Some of the most convincing pathology on an X-ray is simply normal anatomy, caught at the wrong angle, pretending to be something it is not....
When an AI flags a lesion on a dental radiograph, the newest systems paint a colored heatmap over the finding to show where they looked. That overlay is a picture in its own right, with its own grammar, its own seductions, and its own honest...
Most dental imaging pictures the hard tissues. Sialography pictures something stranger — the branching, fluid-filled ductal tree of a salivary gland, mapped by letting contrast or saliva itself flow through it. A look at conventional, MR, and ultrasound sialography, and why a century-old technique still...
A detection model will read an underexposed, cone-cut, motion-blurred bitewing without hesitation and hand you a confident, tidy result. That composure is the danger. Everything AI concludes about a radiograph is downstream of how well the image was made - and the machine cannot see...
An AI can mark a dark spot on a bitewing in half a second. Calling that spot a lesion, deciding whether to treat it, and putting your name to the decision are three separate acts the software is not licensed to perform. The report is...