Validation and reporting standards for dental artificial intelligence: Lessons from materials biosafety

Extending dentistry's rigorous biomaterial-biosafety validation principles to artificialintelligence (AI) treatment-planning tools requires prospective and external validation, clearly defined clinical indications, and post-deployment performance monitoring.An orthodontic archwire cannot enter a patient's mouth until it has cleared a defined evidentiary gate.Its corrosion behavior and ion-release profile are quantified under standardized immersion conditions, benchmarked against the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) biocompatibility expectations, and reported in the literature, with the element-specific concentrations measured using techniques such as inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectrometry (ICP-OES).1,2 A clinician selecting that wire can, in principle, trace its safety profile to reproducible measurements.The same cannot be said of the algorithm that increasingly helps determine how that wire will be used.Dentistry has spent decades building a mature, quantitative paradigm for the biosafety of what it places in the patient -alloys, resins and ceramics -yet it is adopting artificial intelligence (AI) into what it decides for the patient with comparatively little validation, transparency or regulatory scaffolding.A discipline that would never accept an uncharacterized biomaterial is, in parallel, accepting largely uncharacterized decision tools.Dental and Medical Problems is a natural venue to identify this inconsistency and propose a corrective framework.