Understanding deep learning - challenges and prospects

The developments in Artificial Intelligence have been on the rise since its advent. The advancements in this field have been the innovative research area across a wide range of industries, making its incorporation in dentistry inevitable. Artificial Intelligence techniques are making serious progress in the diagnostic and treatment planning aspects of dental clinical practice. This will ultimately help in the elimination of subjectivity and human error that are often part of radiographic interpretations, and will improve the overall efficiency of the process. The various types of Artificial Intelligence algorithms that exist today make the understanding of their application quite complex. The current narrative review was planned to make comprehension of Artificial Intelligence algorithms relatively straightforward. The focus was planned to be kept on the current developments and prospects of Artificial Intelligence in dentistry, especially Deep Learning and Convolutional Neural Networks in diagnostic imaging. The narrative review may facilitate the interpretation of seemingly perplexing research published widely in dental journals

Preprocedural pool testing strategy for dentistry during the COVID-19 pandemic

Introduction: Aerosol-generating procedures (AGPs) put the dental health care professionals (DHCPs) at a greater risk for acquiring severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection. In late June 2020, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advised elective dental procedures provision to asymptomatic patients while mandating strict infection control protocol and suggested the use of preprocedural testing as an adjunct. A cost-effective method for mass preprocedural testing is pool testing, which has specificity and sensitivity similar to polymerase chain reaction. This article aims to assess the outcomes and utility of incorporating preprocedural testing protocol for SARS-CoV-2 in dental clinics before providing AGPs.Method: The patients who were recommended AGPs where rubber dam placement was not possible were advised to undergo preprocedural testing for SARS-CoV-2. Pool testing strategy was employed, and patients were asked to get tested 48 h before the day of the procedure.Results: Out of a total of 1,000 patients, who presented from June 2020 to late July 2020, 464 were recommended dental procedures. In 194 of 464, AGPs could not be performed under rubber dam isolation; therefore, the patients were advised to get a preprocedural pool test. In total, 111 patients deferred the procedure and testing. Out of 83 who got tested, 7 were positive for SARS-CoV-2, 5 of whom were tested in early June 2020 and 2 in late July 2020.Conclusion: Pool testing within its limitations can be a useful preprocedure test in asymptomatic low-risk patients for AGP in dentistry, especially when the disease prevalence is low or moderate (\u3c10%). It has the potential of reducing testing costs significantly while conserving reagent and other resources. Preprocedure testing, however, also gives rise to certain ethical concerns that also need to be addressed.Knowledge transfer statement: The results of this study can be used by clinicians when deciding which preprocedure testing approach they wish to use when performing aerosol-generating procedures in asymptomatic patients with consideration of cost sensitivity and specificity values

Navigating through our history in research: An altmetric analysis for publications by the full-time operative dentistry faculty at the Aga Khan University Hospital in the past decade

Objective: To analyse the social dissemination of publications by fulltime faculty at a tertiary care facility. Methods: The retrospective study was conducted at the Aga Khan University Hospital, Karachi, and comprised publication records of the fulltime Operative Dentistry faculty members between July 2011 till July 2021. The search was done on Google Scholar, Altmetric Explorer and PubMed electronic databases. After final screening, all the publications in PubMed-indexed journals, including in vitro studies, randomised controlled trials, original research articles, case reports and letters to the editor, for which the Altmetric Attention Score was available were included. Results: Of the 225 publications identified, 34 (15%) formed the final sample. The cumulative citation count for the publications was 617 and Altmetric Attention Score was 158. There were 16 Facebook mentions and 163 tweets. Conclusion: The social impact of publications by the Operative Dentistry faculty over a decade was not convincing in terms of Altmetric Attention Score

Power-Efficient and Highly Scalable Parallel Graph Sampling using FPGAs

Energy efficiency is a crucial problem in data centers where big data is generally represented by directed or undirected graphs. Analysis of this big data graph is challenging due to volume and velocity of the data as well as irregular memory access patterns. Graph sampling is one of the most effective ways to reduce the size of graph while maintaining crucial characteristics. In this paper we present design and implementation of an FPGA based graph sampling method which is both time- and energy-efficient. This is in contrast to existing parallel approaches which include memory-distributed clusters, multicore and GPUs. Our strategy utilizes a novel graph data structure, that we call COPRA that allows time- and memory-efficient representation of graphs suitable for reconfigurable hardware such as FPGAs. Our experiments show that our proposed techniques are 2x faster and 3x more energy efficient as compared to serial CPU version of the algorithm. We further show that our proposed techniques give comparable speedups to GPU and multi-threaded CPU architecture while energy consumption is 10x less than GPU and 2x less than CPU

Conservative management of invasive cervical resorption: a case Report

Abstract Invasive cervical resorption is a condition that affects the root surface area below the epithelial attachment. Multiple treatment modalities are advocated, involving exposure of the invasive defect, removal of the granulation tissue and sealing with various restorative materials. This report demonstrates conservative treatment of a patient presenting with peri-apical periodontitis in upper right central and lateral incisors, along with Class II invasive resorption defect cervically on the mesial aspect of the central incisor, as a result of trauma. As the patient was not willing for any surgical intervention, only ortho-grade root canal treatment was carried out in both teeth, with Calcium hydroxide as intra-canal medicament. At three year follow-up, the patient remains asymptomatic demonstrating radiographic evidence of infilling of defect with bone-like tissue. Within the limitations of this report, it was seen that this conservative method for halting the progression of invasive cervical resorption could be under taken in patients who are un-willing for surgical intervention or in whom surgery is contra-indicate

Inculcating research curriculum in operative dentistry - endodontics residency programme: Experience and outcomes

Incorporating research education and training in residency curriculum increases the understanding of evidence-based decision-making among doctors in training. Evidence suggests that the addition of research is linearly associated with improvement in clinical competence, and encourages the residents to shape their career as clinical investigators. The current paper was planned to share the experience of adding research into the core curriculum of Operative Dentistry-Endodontics residency programme at a tertiary care university hospital, and to evaluate the outcome achieved with that change

An Efficient & Less Complex Solution to Mitigate Impulsive Noise in Multi-Channel Feed-Forward ANC System with Online Secondary Path Modeling (OSPM)

This paper deals with impulsive noise (IN) in multichannel (MC) Active Noise Control (ANC) Systems with Online Secondary Path Modelling (OSPM) employing adaptive algorithms for the first time. It compares performance of various existing techniques belonging to varied computational complexity range and proposes four new methods, namely: FxRLS-VSSLMS, VSSLMS-VSSLMS, FxLMAT-VSSLMS and NSS MFxLMAT-VSSLMS to deal with modest to very high impulsive noise (IN). Simulation results show that these proposed methods demonstrated improved performance in terms of fast convergence speed, lowest steady state error, robustness and stability under impulsive environment in addition to modelling accuracy for stationary as well as non-stationary environment besides reducing computational complexity many folds