Kyumin Whang, PhD, is an expert in the chemistry of dentistry. The Barry K. Norling Endowed Professor in Comprehensive Dentistry in the School of Dentistry at UT Health San Antonio creates dental composites, which are chemical formulations used in dental procedures, cavity filling, or sealants.
“I'm trying to develop safer, more effective, metal composites, denture materials, filling materials, and stents,” Whang explained.
There hasn’t been a lot of innovation in the field of dental composites over the years, Whang said, because it's a complicated process. You’re crafting ‘recipes’ for composites that will be put in your mouth for years."
“You cannot just put three or four different ingredients in and make it,” Whang said. “So, since 1960, we're still mainly using a lot of similar type materials, and that's because to test out and to optimize a new formulation is just extremely tedious, very expensive, and very difficult to do.”
Whang led a collaboration between The University of Texas at San Antonio’s School of Dentistry and College of Engineering and Integrated Design. The team trained and tested artificial intelligence models to see if they could accurately predict which composite formulas have potential. They wanted the AI to forecast things like how well a new material might resist fracture, whether it would shrink after placement, and how durable it might be once in a patient’s mouth.
To do this, the team had to build a dataset. They put together 240 commercially available dental composites from across the scientific literature and ran them through the models. The results were promising, Whang said, and it's just the beginning.
Whang plans to continue to build the dataset to make the AI model’s forecasts more accurate, and in a few years, he wants to share it.
“We want to create a website where companies and researchers can input their data sets, their ingredients, and their product data, in exchange for using the model for free,” he said. “With that kind of an exchange, everybody now has the opportunity to make good materials, and hopefully the competition will be even better.”
And the fillings and sealants that dentists put in your teeth and mouth will look better, be better, and last longer, too.
Science & Medicine is a collaboration between TPR and The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio that explores how scientific discovery in San Antonio advances the way medicine is practiced everywhere.
