• Research
• Expressions Spring 2026

DentalGPT: World’s First Dental AI Model

A New Era of AI-Powered Oral Healthcare Begins in the GBA

The Faculty of Dentistry develops DentalGPT with its partners

A new chapter in digital dentistry is unfolding in the Greater Bay Area, as HKU Faculty of Dentistry and its partners unveil DentalGPT – the world’s first multimodal large language model purpose-built for dental image recognition.

Jointly developed with The Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen), Shenzhen Stomatology Hospital (Pingshan) of Southern Medical University, Peking University National Biomedical Imaging Center, and Shenzhen Freedom AI Technology Co., Ltd., DentalGPT represents a leap forward in how artificial intelligence can support oral healthcare. Unlike general AI models, DentalGPT has been trained on an extensive, professionally curated dataset of dental images and refined with advanced reinforcement-learning strategies. This enables it to discern fine-grained radiographic details while performing sophisticated clinical reasoning.

DentalGPT can accurately interpret intra-oral photographs, panoramic x-rays and other routine dental images, identify a wide spectrum of common oral diseases, and provide clear, image-based explanations. In tests using multiple disease-classification datasets annotated by licensed dentists, it achieved an average score of 67.1 – outperforming leading general-purpose multimodal models and demonstrating superior clinical relevance.

This breakthrough goes beyond technical performance. DentalGPT is designed to power a closed-loop “hospital–home–community” oral health management ecosystem. In clinics, it can support dentists in diagnosis and treatment planning; at home, it has the potential to underpin smart applications that help individuals better understand and monitor their oral health; in the community, its aggregated, anonymised data can contribute to real-time insights on oral disease patterns.

Over time, DentalGPT is expected to help generate a detailed epidemiological map of oral health across the Greater Bay Area, offering powerful evidence to guide public-health strategies, resource allocation and preventive programmes. By turning everyday clinical images into population-level intelligence, it bridges individual care and community wellbeing.

For the cross-disciplinary team behind the project, DentalGPT signals a shift in how AI fits into dentistry—from being merely “usable” to becoming genuinely “helpful and routinely used.” As the model continues to evolve and be integrated into real-world settings, it stands to transform not only how oral diseases are detected and managed, but also how data-driven, equitable and prevention-focused oral healthcare can be delivered at scale.