Artificial Intelligence Takes the Guesswork Out of Dental Care
MIT alumni-founded company analyzes and annotates dental X-rays to help dentists offer more comprehensive care.
A hospital radiologist is often pictured as a specialist who sits in a dark room and spends hours poring over X-rays to make diagnoses. Contrast that with your dentist, who in addition to interpreting X-rays must also perform surgery, communicate with patients, manage staff, and run their business. When dentists analyze X-rays, they generally do so in bright rooms and on computers that aren’t specialized for radiology, often with the patient sitting right next to them.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise, then, that dentists given the same X-ray might propose different treatments.
“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 MIT alumni-founded company that uses artificial intelligence to analyze and annotate X-rays for dentists and insurance providers. Overjet’s goal is to take the subjectivity out of X-ray interpretations to improve patient 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 company 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 (FDA) to detect and outline cavities and quantify bone levels to aid in the diagnosis of periodontal disease, a common but preventable gum infection that causes the jawbone and other tissues supporting the teeth to deteriorate.
Besides helping dentists detect and treat diseases, Overjet’s software is also designed to help dentists show patients the problems they’re seeing and explain why they’re recommending certain treatments.
The company has already analyzed tens of millions of X-rays. They are used by dental practices nationwide and are currently working with insurance companies that represent more than 75 million patients in the U.S. Inam is hoping the data Overjet is analyzing can be used to further streamline operations while improving care for patients.
“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 about the dental industry until her interest was piqued after a bad experience in 2018.
Inam came to MIT in 2010, first for her master’s and then her PhD in electrical engineering and computer 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 classes at the Sloan School of Management, Inam eventually started a number 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 in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), Inam and a group of researchers applied machine learning to wireless signals to create biomedical sensors that could track a person’s movements, detect falls, and monitor respiratory rate.
She didn’t get interested in dentistry until after leaving MIT, when she changed dentists and received an entirely new treatment plan. Confused by the change, she asked for her X-rays and asked other dentists to have a look, only to receive still another variation in diagnosis and treatment recommendations.
