Dentaltown November 2019 - 14

howard speaks
column

Artificial Intelligence Is on Third
Somewhere about the sixth grade, I decided that I was
going to ride the wave of the great sovereign profession of
dentistry. I threw my surfboard in the water and surfed
all the way to first base, 1987, as a doctor of dentistry.
Then, around 1998, I began studying to earn an MBA.
In one of the first classes I took, I learned how most
of the major moves of the stock market, from 1850 to
present, were basically all technology moves. First,
there was the telegraph. Then, with the invention of
the steam engine, everything began to get faster, easier,
higher quality, lower cost and smaller.
Whenever you had a very new, disruptive technology-like a gasoline-powered engine, measured in
horsepower, replacing teams of actual horses-that's
where all the money went. As steam engines got smaller,
they could use them to power ships. When the ships got
to America, we started building canals. The telegraph
turned into the telephone, which turned into the internet.
Early on, I realized that this AOL dial-up thing
that everybody thought was a joke was actually a very
serious game-changer. And because I already had my
surfboard in the dental sovereign profession, I decided
to add the next big thing-the internet-to what I
was doing. I turned what had been a 4,000-subscriber,
30-page newsletter, The Farran Report
Report, into an interactive
community named Dentaltown, and then I was standing
on second base. I'm still a practicing dentist who saw
patients and did root canals and extractions this week,
but I also have this dental internet media company.
Now I can see clearly who's on third base-it's
artificial intelligence (AI), and it's everywhere.

The big future for big data
When I bought my Cerec machine-before most
of the people teaching CAD/CAM today were even
born!-its use was limited because of the size of
the processing chips. Back then, programmers
had to decide between memory or speed
of the microprocessor. Today, thanks
to Moore's perception (the number of
transistors on a microchip doubles
every two years, while the cost goes
down), CAD/CAM and CBCT have
become big, and we have a bunch
of things all coming together now.
With elastic cloud computing,
for example, a machine that normally would take a thousand
hours to process something
now can do it in an hour
with a cloud computing
service through Google,
A ma zon or the like.
Combine that with big data,
which identifies algorithms,
and dentistry's really about
to change.
When I scan an impression and send it to the lab,
the scan works with just that
one impression. But after 10
impressions have come in,
the lab has 10 times more data.

Learn more about artificial intelligence in dentistry
To hear more about the rising use of AI in dentistry, check out Dr. Howard Farran's podcast
with cosmetic dentist Dr. Kyle Stanley, whose company, Pearl, leverages data to provide
dentists with data about pathologies, practice intelligence and more. To stream the podcast,
go to dentaltown.com/podcast-pearl.

by Howard Farran, DDS, MBA, publisher, Dentaltown magazine

NOVEMBER 2019 // dentaltown.com

http://www.dentaltown.com/podcast-pearl http://www.dentaltown.com

Dentaltown November 2019

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Dentaltown November 2019