"Trust-Building Technology" - Transforming Dentistry with AI (feat. Dr. Shervin Molayem)

Host Dan Brian speaks with Dr. Shervin Molayem, a periodontist and dental tech entrepreneur, about the transformative impact of AI in dentistry. They discuss the evolution of dental technology, the role of AI in enhancing practice efficiency, and the importance of building trust with patients through accurate diagnostics and treatment planning. Dr. Molayem shares insights on the future of robotics in dentistry, the challenges of regulatory approval, and the significance of AI's impact on the oral-systemic connection. The conversation emphasizes that AI will enhance, not replace, the role of dentists, ultimately improving patient care and experience. Don't miss it and check out the complete show notes. 

Key Takeways

• AI is revolutionizing the dental industry, impacting practice management and patient care.
• The integration of AI in dentistry is expected to enhance workflows and diagnostics.
• Trust in dental care can be improved through AI-driven transparency and accuracy.
• Robotics in dentistry is on the horizon, with significant advancements expected by 2028.
• Regulatory bodies will need to adapt to the rapid changes in dental technology.
• AI can analyze vast amounts of data to provide more accurate treatment plans.
• The oral-systemic connection is crucial and can be better understood with AI.
• AI tools can help standardize treatment plans, reducing variability in patient care.
• Dentists should view AI as a collaborative partner rather than a replacement.
• Continuous data collection and analysis will drive future innovations in dentistry.

Transcript

0:00

Hey everyone, welcome back to the Dental Domination podcast. My name is Dan Bryan. I am the host of this crazy old thing and also the co-founder over at Dentalscapes. We're an online marketing company specifically for dental practices. And dental is all we talk about here. Specifically, we're focused on practice management, marketing, and patient experience. And today I've got a really cool topic lined up, I think, with a great special guest. uh Dr. Shervin Malyam is here to talk about AI in dentistry. and how AI is transforming the practice uh pretty much everywhere you look. I think if we, you know, fast forward a year or two from now, we're going to look back on this episode as relatively prescient as I think a lot of the things that maybe we take for granted in the practice of dentistry are going to look a lot different uh in the relative near future. So anyhow, um with that being said, I wanted to turn it over to you, Dr. Malyam. You are a practicing periodontist. In addition to being a serial entrepreneur within the dental tech space, you are the co-founder of multiple ventures and you've got some pretty excited things lined up coming out this year. So what can you tell us more on? Tell our listeners about who you are, how you got involved in dentistry, but not only that, how you got involved in dental tech and AI specific. Yeah, well, you know, it's been about like five years that I really got into dental technology. Really, as a periodontist, you're looking at the foundation of the mouth. Research is a really big part of my practice in general, just my training. And when you're in the research realm, you're able to kind of see the trends and things that are coming out and the direction. And to this day, you know, I've been practicing for 15 years and the amount of change that we've seen in the past year or two is mind boggling. you know, your viewers are probably seeing it themselves. They're seeing advertisements. They're hearing the word AI everywhere. There are some different silos and different products coming out that are doing different things that are all kind of different and some integrate with each other and some don't. But what we're going to be seeing in AI as far as dentistry is a transformation of the workflow from A to Z. It's going to touch all facets of practice. So, you know, as far as your own experience, what sort of, you know, led you into dental tech and got you involved in this space? When really COVID, when that came about, uh a little bit before that, I started to get involved in teledentistry, actually before uh COVID, which was kind of timely. Then uh working with uh founders and investing in dental startups and really being a risk taker and trying to figure out what the next thing is and how all this relates to dentists is true. we're trying to figure out the pain points of dentistry. So another thing that I got involved with was cloud dentistry, which is a dental staffing platform. So, you before you ask the dentist, you know, what's, what's the problem with your practice? They're like, my God, I'm trying to find a hygienist, trying to find a dentist. Oh, like, and then it's like, okay, what are you doing? Going down Craig's list. I'm uh indeed. And, and if you look at other fields like medicine and, and, and really all areas of healthcare, you'll see that they've had this platform, they have this organized. And so with cloud dentistry, which is now the largest and fastest growing dental staffing platform, ah you know, uh really the past three years have really taken off, we're able to match right there in the app. It's kind of where like an Uber meets LinkedIn, where people could just book right away. And we, and I've seen the transformation and how easy it is. And people would just go and scroll and see ratings. so, uh and I'm just kind of going through the flow of dentistry. how, what else is a pain point? Well, well, you you start with the hygienist, you know, what's their like? They like, and they are probing and they're wearing gloves while they're probing, but they have to read out these numbers and they can't write it down and they can't type and... at the same time, they have to get a dental assistant that takes time. If there's one available, if not, they have to just, you know, so there's all these different challenges. So I also got involved with the company that is coming out with a probe uh using AI technology that could automatically just put the probe around the pocket and it'll just automatically input the number because it has these sensors and cameras and it'll know exactly at what pressure, right? Because right now also dentistry is very subjective. So with AI, we're able to make it more objective. So another technology is uh mobility, to figure out what the tooth mobility is. Is it plus one? Is it plus two? Is it plus three mobility? That's pretty subjective. But what if there is a technology that could send a sound wave down to the tooth and see what bounces back and know exactly one out of 100 what that mobility number is. And what was it last time? What was it before the scaling or planning? What is it after? So we're gonna be able to predict better and make better decisions, which is gonna help overall patient care. Yeah. Now, you know, all of these advancements in technology and AI are amazing. And I think I'm with you and on the same page where I think it's really going to enhance and not replace dentists going forward and actually make practice better for both providers and patients. uh But what would you say to, you know, maybe a long established dentist who's looking at these changes and the way they may affect workflows in the future and thinking, I, this stuff makes me nervous. I mean, what How would you counter that sentiment? Yeah. So longstanding dentists is probably, you know, they're getting older. There, maybe their eyes aren't, although their experience is better, their eye might not be able to see as, as, as good. And, know, the amount of shades of gray that our eyes are able to see is exponentially less than what an AI can see. The AI can see like 250 something shades of gray, uh, where they're, you know, uh, being able to look at the. the radiograph and with accuracy of 50 % diagnosis of catching things versus being in the 90s. So that's a big jump. Like in technology, if you're gonna just be a little bit better, it's hard to get adoption. But if you're gonna almost double the amount of detection, ah offices are able to diagnose 30 something percent more pathology on x-rays. Now these aren't small numbers. No. Yeah. So, you know, as you look at some of the technology that's out there now relative to AI and um setting aside for a moment, the amazing things you're doing with the new uh perio probe and some of these other technologies, what do you see that's out there right now that that's making the biggest splash for you that you're most excited about in terms of its potential to transform workflows for folks right now? So what we're working on right now with a company called Trust AI is we're looking to bring trust into dentistry. What that means is patients, go to the office, they don't know what really is going on in their mouth, right? Unless they have pain. And so they don't know if they have five cavities, if they have 10, if they should take out this tooth or not. uh There's so much that they don't understand and they're basically trying to just trust the dentist's word. Sometimes It's correct and sometimes it's not. That's why you see a social media post, something that has to do with dentistry and you look down in the comments and you're saying all these angry patients. My dentist told me that my dentist charged me that, you know, and then there's a study of a patient in New York. They took their treatment plant 10 different or so dentists and they got 10 different treatment plants ranging anywhere from zero to a hundred thousand. Well, It's time for that number of treatment plans to be maybe three or maybe four treatment plans. Maybe you have an aggressive one, a band-aid approach, something that's a conservative and somewhere around there, there shouldn't be so many. So if we're able to bring the diagnosis and then the treatment plan and standardize it, go back to the basics is the data collection. So that probe. that uh x-ray, ah now they have 3D detection, they got FDA approved. So if you're able to have AI to analyze the data collection, and then the probe has a pressure sensor, and so then you have this AI, like a trust AI, which is like the brain of the dental office that can analyze it, then you're gonna have more specific plans, more precise, more accurate, more objective. and patients will trust dentists more and as a result they're going to want to do dentistry more. Do you foresee a world where a dentist becomes, I don't know what the word of it is, but sort of an intermediary in communicating the treatment plan of the AI technology, or is this a really collaborative approach in your? Yeah, the AI will, I want to say never replace, it's, it's, they work hand in hand. They augment the dentist, they enhance the dentist. They're making things more efficient. making dentists faster, smarter. And really that's going to make dentists life less stressful. So, you know, all of this will eventually, you know, end up, be like a robot that, you know, people are talking about that are, they coming to dentistry? Well, they will, they will. There's a... you actually have a connection to, think, Perceptive that's doing a lot within that space, right? Yeah, yeah, so, you know, we're close with the CEO and he's a dentist by trade. uh Their company is amazing. They are, you know, they have like 15 MIT PhDs working for them. uh They also invented a new type of scan that uses a technology called OCT that uh is non-ionizing radiation, so it's not like taking x-rays. And it could figure out exactly where, in three dimensions, where the carries is, where right now we don't have that. Right now we have a 2D x-ray. takes 30 % on an x-ray of demineralization of that to be caught. If there's a radio lucency, takes time for that to show up, where this is to the micron almost. work it figure out that 3D scan is going to be critical for the actual robotic procedure then. Exactly, and they had to invent that to do the robotics. It wouldn't be possible without it. Right. And now they've entered some kind of trial now, haven't they? Or where is that at? mean, how soon might we be looking at robotics in your dental practice on the corn? yeah, we're looking at 2028. Yeah, the scanner is coming out next year in 2026. Yeah. If you have any sense right now as to when, you know, AI robotic power dentistry might be, you know, financially or economically accessible to most practice owners. Yeah. So for example, Perceptive, with that company, you don't need to buy the robot. You lease it. And so it's going to be very easily available where you can just pay a few thousand dollars a month for the scanner, a few thousand dollars a month for the robot. And if you don't like it and if you're not using it it's not working for you, you could return it. And you're not stuck with this big heavy expense. Yeah, and now you know a lot of this is really for lack of a better word, the wild wild west of dentistry, at least right now. But like you said, in two years, maybe 2028, we'll be looking at something completely different. And our perceptions, speaking of perceptive, they're going to shift over time. But that said, what is the role of the regulatory environment in all of this? Do you see, you know, dental boards? Do you see the government? You see, you know, state regulatory? bodies catching on to this stuff or are we in a situation where they're going to have to catch up pretty damn quick? Yeah, you know, everything takes time. So if you look at, for example, Bitcoin, you saw how much, you know, 10 years ago, people laughed and people, you know, look at it now. ah If you look at self-driving cars, laughed at it. Like I would never get in a car. Now you see cars driving on the street. I live in Los Angeles. You have Waymo. Now you have Tesla coming out in Austin, self-driving. And you're like, hey, actually that, that I'm safer there. So like with perceptives, if you move during the procedure, it moves with the patient. Yeah. Yeah, that's, that's amazing. Now, you know, your own experience, you know, working, um, with the, the many ventures that you have within dental tech and the AI driven space, this perio probe, for instance, what's been your experience like in terms of getting, you know, regulatory approval on these types of things to use in practice? Are you at all concerned about that down the line? Or you think, you think these regulatory agencies will catch up to the new catch up. It'll take a little bit more time perhaps, but it's not hard to do a FDA study to show periodontal probing. That one has a pressure, it's going to be a couple of people doing it and then comparing it to freehand. The robot, let's go before the robot because that's the last step. Then you have the diagnosis and treatment plan, which is what Trust AI is, right? The Trust AI is really tackling. And for that, uh you're going to need a lot of cases. know, it could be full mouth reconstruction cases where, you know, and the more data that's put into this. So right now you go to an office, there's one dentist, one brain and all their experience. But what if you have a thousand? Be amazing. You know, so you're getting a thousandth opinion, right? So and then it kind of averages it out. But what we do with two things that are really unique. One, we have a trust score. We believe that nothing in life is 100 percent, as you probably can agree. so our record. Yeah, yeah, what what what the taxes and debt is that what you're going to say? I was listening to a podcast recently with Brian Johnson and he's saying in the year 20, in 100 years from now, he wants to be the person that was in the history book showing that to not be the case. So you never know either. The longevity experts, the futurists like Raymond, I forgot his last name. He talks about in the year 2030, we're going to have something called escape velocity, where people are going to start living perhaps forever. You know, obviously we'll start with the wealthy, the ones that are doing all of the blood transfusions and this and that, but AI is able to pick up research is going to be much more quick. Research is going to be on the blockchain. People are going to, the researchers aren't going to be able to fudge numbers as much because of that. So we'll get to the truth more. these AI technologies, you know, that most folks now are accustomed to, or at least many are using now, chat GPT. couldn't personally live without it now. You may be the same way, but these, you know, they're called large language models and essentially they just intake a ton of data and they're trained on that. You know, they're, they're really, they're constantly training and evolving and they're getting this knowledge from just an infinite source of data. What is the data right now, you know, that will inform say this robotic technology by perceptive and will inform the treatment planning technologies like it trust AI. Like where are you sourcing that data right now? Yeah. So from actual patient cases, you need a lot of cases. uh You need the patients to sign off on it, which is not easy. And you need thousands of cases. So that's really the tough part. for example, you say, OK, well, the schools are a good place. Well, way that dentistry is done in schools is not exactly always you would think it's the the way, which maybe it's like the textbook way, but it's also maybe not the, you know, practical way, right? So, uh you know, so you, and so you need different data sources. Can't just be one, it has to be multiple. Maybe the East coast dentists practice different than the West coast. And maybe the ones in England do it different than the ones in, you know, uh Canada. So, uh And so eventually you're going to need different data sources to be able to make it more unified. Absolutely. Yeah. You know, one other thing before we close out here that I think is so interesting that you voiced offline here was about the impact that AI and dental technology may have uh in terms of uh the conversation about the oral systemic connection. What did you mean by that? And where do you see that? Yeah. So I'm really big on the oral systemic connection. And that's uh really near and dear to my heart as a periodontist. ah Now, what that means for AI is it means that we're going to be able to, you know, for example, we right now are able to do is take the different data sources or, or when a patient is getting data collection, uh we're going to have, again, objective data. from FMX, CBCT, periodontal charting, medical dental history. And we're going to get, soon enough, we'll have blood tests and genetic tests. And that will be now tied into the mouth. So we'll know, particularly for that person, if they have the IL-6 gene. is a high risk and you get one from each parent. Those people have higher risk for getting periodontal disease. Now, if they have that, then we see we do a saliva test now and we have that data that they have, they have, you know, P. gingivalis and fusobacterium nucleotum and they're at this level. And they're on these medications which are drying their mouth. Oh, and their CBCT is showing their airway is narrow. So or their nose, they can't breathe well because they have a deviated septum which will show up on a uh CBCT. Well, now they're mouth breathing at night. So all of these, know, and because they're doing that, perhaps they're grinding their teeth and clenching their teeth and now that's putting too much force. So maybe an implant in this area shouldn't be a four millimeter diameter, should be a five millimeter diameter. Oh, but you know what, their 90 year old lady, uh we can get away with a smaller one for that person. So now we're going to be able to take all this information, gender, age, medical dental history, right? And I'll put it all together. And then, you know, if they have diabetes, if they have low vitamin D levels, that also affects their healing. So they may have to take some extra vitamins after a procedure so they heal better. I can go on and on, but we're going to have this, you know, these different uh really amazing, uh it's going to be a whole new set of research and information that's also going to be coming up. It is amazing. I'm also big on the oral systemic connection is something I think is so important and often so overlooked and you know, also big into dental medical integration. And I think that there's a lot of opportunity here for, you know, this technology and AI to move the needle on that because as you know, you and I both know it's it's taken a while to get to even where we are today. And so hopefully this will only accelerate that movement as well. uh Lots of cool stuff on the horizon, lots to look forward to, I think. And I agree with you that I don't think dentists out there should be afraid of being replaced. I don't think that's what's at hand here at all. I think you're right that AI will enhance, not replace dentists. uh Increased trust, I hope. I hope you're right about that. The work that you're doing at Trust.ai I think is so important. And I think it really does have the opportunity to shift the way that patients perceive their own care and the importance of oral health care. And again, its connection to uh systemic conditions. So I'm really excited about the work that you're doing Dr. Shervin. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Before we close out though, um what is the biggest takeaway you want dentists listening to the show today to leave with? And then finally, if I can ask a second question, where can folks connect with you if they want to learn more? Yeah. So the most important thing right now is because there's information overload and people are getting bombarded. Right. So what came out into the actual, you know, general public first with AI was chat GPT. And that's how people got introduced to it. So I would start with a chat GPT like, you know, thing if I were a dentist. And so we actually put out with Trust AI, we, we, free, a hundred percent free chat. where a dentist could ask any question and get an answer without it hallucinating. So we designed it so that it won't give wrong information. And so we compared it to ChatGPT and we see it's more accurate and it doesn't give out wrong information, which is important in healthcare, especially dentistry. So that's where I would start. Then they're going to be able to take an X-ray and upload it. And then... have a conversation. it's not the thing is it's not about putting the information and getting a spit out. Thank you so much and telling the patient what we created. We created a co-pilot. So we put in information just like chat.gbt after you upload a PDF, you upload things. Now it understands it. And now you have the conversation with it. And so that's where you want to, you know, we have a voice conversation. You could type it out, but that's where it's at. It's you want a thinking partner and in a decision, you don't want a decision maker. You want a thinking partner, a copilot. Yeah, and so now this uh tool, is this something folks can find on the Trust.ai website and where would folks be able to connect? Yeah. So they can just go on trust dentistry.ai then they can, uh, you know, it takes one second, put your email phone number and boom, you get it for free. Awesome, sounds good. We'll definitely include that in the show notes so folks can check that out. Anything else that you would say, any other opportunities to connect with you? I imagine you're on LinkedIn and folks can find you that way. Are you gonna be doing any public speaking anytime soon? Folks can get out and hear you in person. actually, yeah, there looks like I'm going to be on a TED talk talking about this TEDx. So yeah, so I'm excited about that. It's going to happen hopefully in the next six months. the I think people, everyone has a dentist, everyone has teeth. So everyone knows that this is like a problem in dentistry as far as the general public. And they're looking for something like this to help the industry. Yeah, 100%. Well, thank you so much, Dr. Shervin, for joining us today. I really appreciate it. I'm sure that everyone out there got some great value out of it, as I did as well. To that end, if you enjoyed what you heard today on the podcast, please take a moment and give us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you get this show. It is the best possible way for us to reach other dentists and practice administrators out there and help other folks. So thank you so much and... uh To you, Dr. Shervin, thank you. can't thank you enough for coming on today. All right, take care. care. All right. Bye, everyone.