Abstract
With the rapid advancement of digital technologies, dental education is undergoing a significant shift from traditional models to digital learning approaches. This transformation helps address the imbalance between the growing number of dental students and the limited availability of teaching faculty, while also supporting more effective instruction and enhancing students’ clinical competencies and professional development. Large language models (LLMs), with their advanced capabilities in language reasoning and comprehension, show considerable potential in both dental clinical practice and education. However, dental training is inherently extensive and multifaceted, encompassing didactic instruction, preclinical simulation, clinical skill development, and specialty rotations, and it must meet the needs of a diverse range of learners, including undergraduates, postgraduates, residents, and specialists. Despite the promise of LLMs, their application in dental education has not yet been systematically reviewed, resulting in a lack of clear guidelines for their appropriate and effective integration into this domain.
This scoping review aims to summarize current applications, identify challenges encountered in the implementation process, and outline prospects. A comprehensive literature search was conducted in the PubMed, Web of Science, and Embase databases to identify studies related to LLMs and dental education. Relevant studies were screened, selected, and subjected to data extraction to collect information pertinent to the research questions. A total of 748 records were initially identified, and 37 studies were finally included. LLMs have been applied across seven distinct domains in dental education, notably in dental examinations (n = 24), educational information resources (n = 5), and assessment of students’ assignments (n = 3). These applications have introduced several challenges, including technical issues (i.e., inaccurate information, inability in image analysis, inaccessibility, and high cost) and application aspects (i.e., ethical issues, absence of usage guidelines, potential harm to students’ knowledge and skills, and cautious attitudes toward LLMs). Addressing these challenges requires coordinated efforts from students, educators, curriculum administrators and technical developers in terms of teaching module change, novel educational framework integration, curriculum reform as well as technical guideline and supports.
In a word, the application of LLMs in dental education remains in its early stage. Future research should focus on expanding the range of applications and establishing standardized, ethically satisfying, and technically sound guidelines for integrating LLMs into dental education.
Presenter(s) / Author(s)
