AI at the Dentist

You’ve left the surgery with a printed plan that says something like “LL6 RCT + e.max crown, UR5 MOD comp, S&P” and a total of £2,115. You nodded through the explanation in the chair. Now you’re at home with a phone and a question: is this right, is it fair, and should you go ahead?

AI tools can help you answer that, though not in the way most people first try. Uploading a photo of your x-ray to ChatGPT and asking “what’s wrong with my teeth?” is the least useful thing you can do. Getting the chatbot to decode the jargon, check the plan hangs together, compare the price against NHS bands and typical private fees, and draft sharp questions for your dentist is where it earns its keep.

This guide covers each of those jobs, with prompts you can copy, a worked example, and the places where AI will mislead you.

Get the right paperwork before you open a chatbot

AI can only work with what you give it. A vague memory of “two fillings and something about a root” produces vague answers. Ask the practice for these four things:

1. The written treatment plan with itemised fees. NHS patients in England should get a form called the FP17DC (the “personal dental treatment plan”), which lists the treatment and the charge band. Private patients should get an itemised estimate. If you were only given a total, ask for the breakdown.
2. The tooth references. Most UK dentists use Palmer notation (UR6 = upper right first molar) or the FDI two-digit system (16 = the same tooth). Make sure every item has a tooth attached.
3. Your x-rays and the clinical notes. Under UK GDPR you can request a copy of your records through a subject access request. It’s free in almost all cases and the practice has one month to respond. Many practices will simply email the images if you ask at reception.
4. Your BPE score, if gum treatment is mentioned. The Basic Periodontal Examination gives each of six mouth sections a score from 0 to 4. A row like 2 | 1 | 3 / 2 | 2 | 4 tells you far more than “some gum disease”.

With the itemised plan and tooth references alone, a chatbot can do about 80% of the useful work. The x-rays matter mainly if you’re seeking a second opinion from a human.

Translating the plan: a worked example

Here’s a realistic private plan from a practice in the south-east, typed out exactly as the patient received it:

Paste it into ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini with a prompt like this:

I'm a UK patient with no dental training. Below is my private dental
treatment plan. For each line:
1. Explain in plain English what the treatment is and which tooth it is
   (I think the dentist uses Palmer notation).
2. Explain why a dentist would typically recommend it.
3. Tell me whether the items depend on each other (e.g. must one happen
   before another?).
4. List what you CANNOT tell from this plan alone.
Do not guess at a diagnosis. Do not tell me whether I need the treatment.

[paste plan]

A good answer will tell you that LL6 is the lower left first molar, the big chewing tooth roughly in the middle of your lower left jaw. Root canal treatment removes infected or dying nerve tissue from inside the tooth, and a crown usually follows on a back tooth because a root-filled molar becomes brittle and prone to splitting. “MOD” means the filling covers three surfaces of UR5 (mesial, occlusal, distal: front side, biting surface, back side), which is a large filling on an upper premolar. E.max is a lithium disilicate ceramic, tooth-coloured and strong enough for molars.

That fourth instruction (“list what you cannot tell”) is the most important line in the prompt. It forces the model to say it can’t see whether the LL6 nerve is actually dead, whether the tooth is restorable, or whether extraction might be a reasonable alternative. Those gaps become your questions for the dentist.

Can AI read your dental x-ray?

There are two very different things hiding behind the phrase “AI dental x-ray”, and confusing them causes most of the bad advice online.

The clinical tools your dentist might already use

A growing number of practices run radiographs through dedicated software trained on millions of labelled dental images. The best-known names are:

• Pearl (Second Opinion), which flags suspected caries, calculus, existing restorations and periapical lesions on bitewings and periapicals.
• Overjet, which also measures bone levels for gum disease assessment.
• Videa Health, used mainly by large US groups.
• Diagnocat, popular in Europe and the UK, particularly for CBCT (3D) scans and panoramic images.

These are built and regulated as medical devices. They draw coloured boxes over areas of concern, and the dentist decides what to do with them. Studies on caries detection typically show these tools raising sensitivity (catching more early decay) compared with an unaided dentist, at the cost of some extra false positives. That trade-off matters to you. A practice using AI detection may find more “early lesions” on your bitewings, and not every one of them needs drilling: many enamel-only lesions can be monitored and treated with fluoride.

If your dentist shows you a screen with highlighted areas, it’s reasonable to ask: “Is that the software’s finding or yours, and would you treat it if the software hadn’t flagged it?” For how widely this is actually happening in British practices, see Do UK Dentists Use AI?.

What happens when you upload an x-ray to ChatGPT

General chatbots can accept images, and they will produce a confident paragraph about your x-ray. That paragraph is not reliable. Typical failure modes:

• Wrong orientation. Bitewings and periapicals have no obvious “up” to an untrained model, so left and right get swapped, and so do upper and lower.
• Invented decay. The normal dark band where enamel meets the gum line (cervical burnout) gets read as a cavity.
• Missed pathology. A small dark halo at a root tip, the sign of infection that justifies a root canal, is easy to miss at phone-photo resolution.
• Wrong image type. A photo of a monitor showing a panoramic x-ray (OPG) loses most of the fine detail a dentist uses.

Here is the sort of exchange you’ll get if you ask properly:

You:   This is a bitewing x-ray of my left side. My dentist says LL6
       needs a root canal. Can you see why?

Model: I can see several molars with existing fillings (bright white
       areas). I can't reliably identify individual teeth or judge the
       health of the nerve from this image. Root canal decisions
       usually depend on a periapical x-ray showing the root tips,
       plus symptoms and tests such as sensitivity to cold. A bitewing
       often doesn't show the root tips at all.

That last point is genuinely useful. Bitewings show the crowns of the back teeth and the bone between them. They often cut off the roots. If your root canal recommendation is based only on a bitewing, it’s fair to ask what other evidence there is (a periapical x-ray, a cold test, pain on biting).

So use the chatbot to understand what kind of x-ray you’ve got and what it can and can’t show. Don’t use it to second-guess what’s on it.

Sanity-checking the price

NHS charges

In England, NHS dentistry costs one of three fixed amounts per course of treatment, however many items are on the plan. The bands set in April 2025 are:

Check nhs.uk for the current figures, since they’re reviewed each April. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland run different systems, so tell the chatbot which nation you’re in.

The worked example above would sit entirely in Band 3 if done on the NHS: £326.70 against £2,115 privately. The NHS crown on a molar would usually be metal or porcelain-fused-to-metal rather than e.max, and finding an NHS dentist taking new adult patients is the real obstacle in many areas. Still, the comparison is worth knowing.

Watch for mixed plans. An NHS dentist can offer some items privately (a white filling on a back tooth, say, or a cosmetic crown material) alongside NHS treatment. That’s allowed, but it must be written on the plan, and you’re entitled to know what the NHS alternative would be. A useful prompt:

I'm an NHS patient in England. My FP17DC shows Band 2 (£75.30), plus a
separate private fee of £180 for a "white filling LL7". Explain what the
NHS would normally provide for a filling on this tooth, and what
questions I should ask about why it's listed privately.

Private fees

Private fees vary widely. London and the south-east run 20 to 40% above much of the north and Wales, and specialists charge more than general dentists. Typical 2025–26 ranges at UK general practices:

Against that table, the example plan is in the normal range: the root canal sits at the upper end for a general dentist and the crown is mid-range. Nothing suggests overcharging. What you’d want to check is whether the £850 includes the post-treatment x-ray and any review appointment, and whether the crown fee includes a temporary crown.

Chatbots are poor at local prices. Their training data mixes US prices, old UK figures and clinic marketing pages. Never accept a number from them without a source. Better approach: ask the chatbot to tell you what to look for on practice fee pages, then check three or four local practices’ published fees yourself. Most private practices publish a price list, and the CQC expects private fee information to be clear.

Prompts that actually move you forward

After the translation step, these three prompts do the most work.

Find the dependencies and the order of treatment:

Here is my dental plan [paste]. If I could only afford half of it right
now, which items are usually most urgent clinically and which can
typically wait a few months? Explain the risk of delaying each. Make it
clear this is general information and my dentist's view takes priority.

Generate the questions you should have asked in the chair:

Based on this plan [paste], write 8 short, polite questions I can email
to my dentist. Include questions about alternatives (including
extraction or doing nothing), success rates, what's included in each
fee, guarantees on crowns, and what happens if the root canal fails.

Typical success rates you can sanity-check against what your dentist says: first-time molar root canals done well succeed somewhere around 85 to 90% over several years, and a crown on a root-filled molar makes long-term survival notably better. If your dentist quotes something very different, ask why.

Compare two quotes like for like:

I have two quotes for the same problem. Practice A: [paste]. Practice B:
[paste]. Line them up in a table, flag items that appear in one but not
the other, and note where the materials or techniques differ (e.g. e.max
vs PFM crown, rotary vs hand root canal, rubber dam mentioned or not).

Whether rubber dam is used for root canal work is a genuinely good question. It’s the accepted standard, and its absence is a reason to ask more.

Where the chatbot goes wrong

Use these tools for long enough and the same errors come up:

• US assumptions. ChatGPT will cheerfully talk about “insurance codes”, “deep cleaning (SRP) per quadrant” and $1,200 crowns. Start every conversation with “I’m in the UK” and the nation you live in.
• Notation confusion. “UL6” and “26” are the same tooth. Universal notation (used in the US) numbers it 14. If the model says something odd about which tooth is which, check the notation.
• Over-reassurance or over-alarm. Ask “is this root canal necessary?” and you’ll get either “your dentist knows best” or a list of scary complications, depending on phrasing. Neither helps. Ask what evidence would normally support the decision instead.
• Out-of-date NHS figures. Older models quote 2023 bands (£25.80, £70.70, £306.80). Check the year.
• Hallucinated sources. If it cites a NICE guideline or a BDA figure, ask for the exact document title and check it exists.

Deciding: go ahead, ask more, or get a second opinion

After the AI groundwork, you’ll usually land in one of three places.

The plan makes sense and the price is in range. Go ahead. Ask if the practice offers staged payment or 0% finance on larger plans (many do through providers like Tabeo or Chrysalis Finance), and confirm the guarantee period on crowns, which is commonly one to five years if you keep up check-ups.

Something doesn’t add up. Maybe a root canal is recommended but you have no pain and only a bitewing was taken, or six fillings appeared at a practice you’ve never visited when your previous dentist found nothing a year ago. Email your questions first. A good dentist will answer them in writing without fuss.

You want another set of eyes. Book a second-opinion appointment elsewhere (typically £50 to £100 privately) and bring your x-rays so they don’t need to be retaken. Tell the second dentist what was proposed, or don’t, if you want an uninfluenced view. Either is legitimate. A second dentist finding different numbers of early cavities is normal; disagreement over whether a tooth needs a root canal or extraction is more significant.

If something goes wrong after treatment, NHS complaints go first to the practice and then to NHS England (or the equivalent in other nations), then the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman. Private treatment complaints that the practice can’t resolve go to the Dental Complaints Service, which is free.

Keeping your data out of places it shouldn’t be

Dental records are health data. Before you upload anything:

• Crop or black out your name, date of birth, NHS number and practice address. Most x-ray exports print these in a corner.
• In ChatGPT, go to Settings → Data Controls and switch off “Improve the model for everyone” if you don’t want conversations used for training. Claude and Gemini have equivalent settings in their privacy menus.
• Use a typed version of your plan rather than a photo where possible. It’s more private, and the model reads typed text more accurately than a skewed phone picture of a printout.

A typed plan with tooth numbers and itemised fees, a clear statement that you’re in the UK, and a prompt that makes the model say what it can’t know: that’s enough to walk back into the practice with better questions than most patients ever ask.