Dental Asia May/June 2020

Under the Spotlight
the clinician and cautions against trusting
machine over a human.
For instance, “If we ask the artificial
intelligence in dentistry today, ‘I don’t know
if I should extract this tooth and replace it
with an implant or if I should keep it; perhaps
it has a good prognosis.’
“If a machine is educated by periodontists
after reading thousands of x-rays, it may
lean towards keeping the tooth since the
periodontists have experience in salvaging
it. But if the machine is conditioned by
implantologists, given the same case, it may
propose an extraction because from the
experience of the implantologists, implant
offers a good solution.”
But with the human touch, a clinician can
spot a nerve that the machine was not able
to. And in this case, the clinician will have
to make the decision that the implant has
to be shorter or it would violate the nerve.
“As long as we remember this, we will be
safe,” he said.
Cultivating future generations
Going back to his job as head of the
Department of Postgraduate Education
& programme director of the Master in
Oral Implantology, Dr Weigl stressed that
continuing education is also the key to
become a good dentist or surgeon.
With science advancing at lightning speed,
one of Dr. Weigl’s desires for his students is
to ‘learn how to learn’. Learning should not
stop after they have completed his course, in
fact, he urged them to keep themselves up to
date with the latest breakthroughs through
reading scientific papers and attending
congresses.
Discernment is also important. “At any
dental show, when they’re being shown new
technology, they need to know when to say,
‘This is good. It is honest and objective,’ or
‘This is nonsense because they don’t have
a good material method,’ or ‘This is just
a selling show because they have a bad
exclusive culture,’” he said.
Bolstered by the positive feedback from his
Chinese implantology students, Dr Weigl
wants to reach out to other international
students who are also affected by language
barriers such as the Latin American
implantologist. As a matter of fact, planning
efforts are already currently underway.
In addition, he would also like to train his
students to think from the perspective of
a ‘director’ and learn to take a holistic and
multidisciplinary approach to their patients.
Often, a specialist, no matter the field of
study, will only see the problem from his
own standpoint. A student who engages
with a colleague outside of his own discipline
may be able to avoid complications that he
did not foresee. By working together as a
team, there could be a viable solution or an
alternative for a complex case that would not
have been possible if they had worked alone.
And this will be one of the focuses of his new
post-graduate course in aesthetic dentistry.
Besides the treatment and documentation of 20 patients in his home country, each student will also
perform three implant treatments under the supervision of a tutor of Goethe University
“When you see a patient getting better
after two months, and how glad they are,
it is tremendously rewarding,” Dr. Weigl
commented. DA
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DENTAL ASIA MAY / JUNE 2020