A dental radiograph is framed for your teeth, but the exposure does not stop at the enamel. In the same grey field sit the sinuses, the jaw, the airway, the soft tissues of the neck - and now and then, something no one was looking...
For years, dental AI pointed: a ring here, a shaded region there. A new generation of vision-language models does something stranger and more human - it describes the radiograph in sentences. The portrait of the mouth is learning to narrate itself....
That grey picture the dentist glances at for a few seconds is one of the most information-dense images in medicine - and reading it is a craft refined over 130 years. Here is what is really on your dental X-ray, and how to look at...