Hi I am a dentist and am looking for ways to incorporate ai in dentistry and its uses in my field. If anyone has any insight on how it can be done, what are the career options in ai in dentistry and course suggestions for this topic please share. I am currently doing ai for everyone. Thank you!
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Deep Learning Specialization (DeepLearning.AI) – For core neural networks and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs).
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Advanced Computer Vision with TensorFlow (Coursera) – For object detection, localization, and image segmentation.
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Digital Image Processing (Coursera) – For classical image processing and preprocessing techniques.
These are really good for building a foundation to work with dental radiographer and scans.
if a dentist is looking for career opportunities in ai, then the courses mentioned by @Amoebaa will not get you career opportunities as employee.
The courses suggested by @Amoebaa is more for people wanting to develop their own project or ai products. Also keep in mind the advanced computer vision with tensorflow is not beginners, it is more of advanced course and one needs to be strong in tensorflow basics professional course, to understand the advanced computer vision course, not to to forget few of the tensorflow mathematical computation is another important strong hold one needs to have with advanced course in tensorflow.
I am not trying to scare you, but just letting you know, if you are dentist, first clearly layout your strong holds, then what are you looking for? if it is looking for job in ai, then I am sorry the above 3 courses will not get you job in ai field. I am just being honest because I have done almost all courses and haven’t still got any ai jobs 
because most of IT companies don’t consider our clinical dental practice as significant because they lack the understanding a dentist is just not a tooth doctor but a combination of artist, engineer and doctor as we handle tools, we shape tooth structure and treat the tooth, so most HR people lack such understanding atleast in India.
Also as per your query looks like you are starting with the first beginner course, so before responding to your query, the first main queries before responding to your query would be?
Is AI for everyone your first AI course to learn?
do you know programming language? per se do you know python?
How strong is your statistics, probability understanding?
Last but the most important what is your reason behind learning ai, is it looking for job or building ai product??
Here is another old topic asking similar query related to healthcare ai opportunities, you can refer to
but what course you want to learn or can learn is more important. With the amount of ai advertisement, good, bad and myths, there should be another job position for the upcoming ai industry, ai professional specific course mentors for better guidance but not as volunteer mentor.
Regards
Dr. Deepti
Hello Dr. Deepti. Thank you for explaining this so honestly. I understand that completing these courses alone will not be enough to secure a core AI or developer role.
I am not planning to make AI my main profession or become an AI developer. I intend to continue dentistry as my primary career and explore AI-related work as a flexible, part-time side hustle that I can do remotely.
The opportunities I have been considering are roles where my dental and clinical knowledge would be valuable, such as:
- Training or evaluating healthcare AI models
- Reviewing AI-generated medical or dental responses for accuracy
- Dental image or clinical-data annotation
- Creating and validating prompts, answers and clinical case scenarios
- Medical content writing and fact-checking
- Healthcare dataset labelling and quality assurance
- Working as a dental subject-matter expert for AI companies
I am starting with AI for Everyone, and I currently do not know Python. My knowledge of statistics and probability is limited to what I studied during BDS, so I would need to refresh it. I am willing to learn some basic technical skills, but I am not presently looking to build an AI product or compete for a full-time software or machine-learning position.
Based on this goal, do these kinds of part-time opportunities realistically exist for dentists? If so, what courses and practical skills would you recommend, and where could I look for such work?
Regards,
Dr. Geerthana Ramachandran.
the opportunities you listed requires you to learn first python coding (Ai for python beginners), then machine learning specialisation, for data annotation, there is no specific course especially related to healthcare but you can try ai for healthcare specialisation.
for checking prompt answering, then you need to understand how LLM works and that again requires Natural language processing specialisation. As many of these specialisation are in tensorflow, you might need to learn basic tensorflow (tensorflow professional certificate specialisation) and lastly explore the short course section based on your interest.
Good luck!!
A role not in your list, and one that never comes up in these discussions, but in my experience is directly applicable is sales.
When I was at IBM, most of the people working on medical solutions were PhD Computer Science who learned something (often a lot but still not MD level) about medicine. But when we took those solutions out in the world, we found we were talking to MDs who generally knew less about machine learning than they thought they did and really only wanted to talk to and trust other MDs. I think having the medical training and certifications gives you a level of credibility that is hard for a pure technologist to earn. You understand their training, their practice, their business. Now you need to learn enough about how AI works to explain how it addresses their needs and how they work. I think it might be interesting to watch the videos of the Machine Learning and Deep Learning specializations even if you don’t do the programming exercises, and see how much you can grasp the concepts. It might help you understand more about the mechanisms under the covers, what is hard and easy for machine learning solutions, and how and why things like annotations are so important. If you can do that, I believe that both AI-native companies and medical device companies that are incorporating AI (eg Siemens) would be very interested in your services.
Thank you so much. Do you ave any suggestions on what are the areas i should cover and which topics and terminologies I should be aware of? Do i need to learn any computer languages like python?
As mentioned above, I suggest look at the video lessons of the Machine Learning specialization ( Machine Learning Specialization - DeepLearning.AI ) or its many equivalents you can find on the interweb. Try following them without doing the programming exercises. Doing the coding will give you a deeper understanding, but try it first without; if you can understand linear regression even at a conceptual level, it will provide a foundation for understanding all AI. Hope this helps
Hello, I suggest you to look for the skills plateform on DeepLearning.ai where you can find programs for your project.