DR. JAY PATEL IS a co-PI on a new grant from the AAO (American Association for Orthodontics). The project builds and tests natural language processing models to automatically extract important orthodontic information from clinical notes in electronic health records, where most of the data is currently buried in free text. By turning these unstructured notes into organized, usable data, we can analyze large orthodontic datasets more efficiently and use them to develop prediction models and clinical decision support tools. The aim is to make orthodontic care more data-driven and consistent, helping clinicians choose the right treatment at the right time and ultimately improve outcomes for children with malocclusion.
