When you image a hospital radiologist, you would possibly consider a specialist who sits in a darkish room and spends hours poring over X-rays to make diagnoses. Contrast that along with your dentist, who along with deciphering X-rays should additionally carry out surgical procedure, handle employees, talk with sufferers, and run their enterprise. When dentists analyze X-rays, they achieve this in shiny rooms and on computer systems that aren’t specialised for radiology, usually with the affected person sitting proper subsequent to them.
Is it any marvel, then, that dentists given the identical X-ray would possibly suggest completely different therapies?
“Dentists are doing a great job given all the things they have to deal with,” says Wardah Inam SM ’13, PhD ’16.
Inam is the co-founder of Overjet, an organization utilizing synthetic intelligence to investigate and annotate X-rays for dentists and insurance coverage suppliers. Overjet seeks to take the subjectivity out of X-ray interpretations to enhance affected person care.
“It’s about moving toward more precision medicine, where we have the right treatments at the right time,” says Inam, who co-founded the corporate with Alexander Jelicich ’13. “That’s where technology can help. Once we quantify the disease, we can make it very easy to recommend the right treatment.”
Overjet has been cleared by the Food and Drug Administration to detect and description cavities and to quantify bone ranges to assist within the prognosis of periodontal illness, a standard however preventable gum an infection that causes the jawbone and different tissues supporting the tooth to deteriorate.
In addition to serving to dentists detect and deal with illnesses, Overjet’s software program can also be designed to assist dentists present sufferers the issues they’re seeing and clarify why they’re recommending sure therapies.
The firm has already analyzed tens of hundreds of thousands of X-rays, is utilized by dental practices nationwide, and is presently working with insurance coverage firms that characterize greater than 75 million sufferers within the U.S. Inam is hoping the information Overjet is analyzing can be utilized to additional streamline operations whereas enhancing look after sufferers.
“Our mission at Overjet is to improve oral health by creating a future that is clinically precise, efficient, and patient-centric,” says Inam.
It’s been a whirlwind journey for Inam, who knew nothing in regards to the dental {industry} till a foul expertise piqued her curiosity in 2018.
Getting to the basis of the issue
Inam got here to MIT in 2010, first for her grasp’s after which her PhD in electrical engineering and pc science, and says she caught the bug for entrepreneurship early on.
“For me, MIT was a sandbox where you could learn different things and find out what you like and what you don’t like,” Inam says. “Plus, if you are curious about a problem, you can really dive into it.”
While taking entrepreneurship courses on the Sloan School of Management, Inam ultimately began plenty of new ventures with classmates.
“I didn’t know I wanted to start a company when I came to MIT,” Inam says. “I knew I wanted to solve important problems. I went through this journey of deciding between academia and industry, but I like to see things happen faster and I like to make an impact in my lifetime, and that’s what drew me to entrepreneurship.”
During her postdoc within the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), Inam and a bunch of researchers utilized machine studying to wi-fi indicators to create biomedical sensors that might observe an individual’s actions, detect falls, and monitor respiratory charge.
She didn’t get fascinated with dentistry till after leaving MIT, when she modified dentists and obtained a wholly new remedy plan. Confused by the change, she requested for her X-rays and requested different dentists to take a look, solely to obtain nonetheless one other variation in prognosis and remedy suggestions.
At that time, Inam determined to dive into dentistry for herself, studying books on the topic, watching YouTube movies, and ultimately interviewing dentists. Before she knew it, she was spending extra time studying about dentistry than she was at her job.
The identical week Inam stop her job, she realized about MIT’s Hacking Medicine competitors and determined to take part. That’s the place she began constructing her group and getting connections. Overjet’s first funding got here from the Media Lab-affiliated funding group the E14 Fund.
“The E14 fund wrote the first check, and I don’t think we would’ve existed if it wasn’t for them taking a chance on us,” she says.
Inam realized {that a} large purpose for variation in remedy suggestions amongst dentists is the sheer variety of potential remedy choices for every illness. A cavity, as an example, could be handled with a filling, a crown, a root canal, a bridge, and extra.
When it involves periodontal illness, dentists should make millimeter-level assessments to find out illness severity and development. The extent and development of the illness determines the very best remedy.
“I felt technology could play a big role in not only enhancing the diagnosis but also to communicate with the patients more effectively so they understand and don’t have to go through the confusing process I did of wondering who’s right,” Inam says.
Overjet started as a instrument to assist insurance coverage firms streamline dental claims earlier than the corporate started integrating its instrument instantly into dentists’ workplaces. Every day, a few of the largest dental organizations nationwide are utilizing Overjet, together with Guardian Insurance, Delta Dental, Dental Care Alliance, and Jefferson Dental and Orthodontics.
Today, as a dental X-ray is imported into a pc, Overjet’s software program analyzes and annotates the pictures robotically. By the time the picture seems on the pc display, it has info on the kind of X-ray taken, how a tooth could also be impacted, the precise degree of bone loss with coloration overlays, the situation and severity of cavities, and extra.
The evaluation offers dentists extra info to speak to sufferers about remedy choices.
“Now the dentist or hygienist just has to synthesize that information, and they use the software to communicate with you,” Inam says. “So, they’ll show you the X-rays with Overjet’s annotations and say, ‘You have 4 millimeters of bone loss, it’s in red, that’s higher than the 3 millimeters you had last time you came, so I’m recommending this treatment.”
Overjet additionally incorporates historic details about every affected person, monitoring bone loss on each tooth and serving to dentists detect instances the place illness is progressing extra rapidly.
“We’ve seen cases where a cancer patient with dry mouth goes from nothing to something extremely bad in six months between visits, so those patients should probably come to the dentist more often,” Inam says. “It’s all about using data to change how we practice care, think about plans, and offer services to different types of patients.”
The working system of dentistry
Overjet’s FDA clearances account for 2 extremely prevalent illnesses. They additionally put the corporate ready to conduct industry-level evaluation and assist dental practices examine themselves to friends.
“We use the same tech to help practices understand clinical performance and improve operations,” Inam says. “We can look at every patient at every practice and identify how practices can use the software to improve the care they’re providing.”
Moving ahead, Inam sees Overjet enjoying an integral function in nearly each side of dental operations.
“These radiographs have been digitized for a while, but they’ve never been utilized because the computers couldn’t read them,” Inam says. “Overjet is turning unstructured data into data that we can analyze. Right now, we’re building the basic infrastructure. Eventually we want to grow the platform to improve any service the practice can provide, basically becoming the operating system of the practice to help providers do their job more effectively.”