Special Issue on AI for Translational Dental Research

Introduction:

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly reshaping dental research and clinical practice by providing new tools for disease detection, risk stratification, image interpretation, treatment planning, biomarker discovery, digital dentistry, and personalized oral healthcare. Translational Dental Research is committed to advancing interdisciplinary studies that bridge stomatology, biomedical engineering, data science, materials science, and clinical medicine. This Special Issue, "AI for Translational Dental Research", aims to collect high-quality original research, reviews, perspectives, and editorials that demonstrate how AI-enabled methods can accelerate the translation of dental discoveries into clinically useful diagnostics, therapeutic strategies, decision-support systems, devices, and workflows. We particularly welcome studies driven by clear clinical or translational questions, supported by robust validation, interpretable models, ethical and reproducible AI practice, and evidence of feasibility for real-world dental and oral healthcare applications.

Topics covered:

• AI-assisted diagnosis, prognosis, risk prediction, and clinical decision support for dental, oral, and craniofacial diseases
• Deep learning for dental, oral, and maxillofacial imaging, including radiography, CBCT, intraoral scanning, radiomics, pathology, and multimodal image analysis
• AI-driven biomarker discovery, omics integration, bioinformatics, microbiome analysis, and precision oral healthcare
• AI-enabled digital dentistry, orthodontics, implantology, prosthodontics, periodontology, endodontics, oral surgery, and preventive dentistry
• Multimodal AI integrating clinical records, imaging, oral fluids, microbiome, omics, wearable/IoT data, and patient-reported outcomes
• Large language models, generative AI, and human-AI interaction in dental education, research, publishing, and clinical practice
• AI for dental biomaterials, drug delivery, tissue engineering, regenerative dentistry, and translational product development
• Smart devices, chairside/point-of-care diagnostics, robotics, and AI-guided workflows for translational dental care
• Clinical validation, real-world deployment, regulatory science, privacy protection, fairness, explainability, reproducibility, and ethics of dental AI

Important deadlines:

Submissions open: 1st June 2026

Submissions close: 30 November 2026

Expected time to first decision: 3 weeks after submission

Submission instructions:

Please read the Guide for Authors before submitting. All submissions should be made via the online editorial system and will be subject to peer review. If the manuscript is accepted, the article will be published open access with no fee payable by the author.

Guest editor:

• Feng Xu, School of Life Science and Technology, Xi'an Jiaotong University, China, Email: fengxu@mail.xjtu.edu.cn
• Ting Wen, Hainan General Hospital (Hainan Affiliated Hospital of Hainan Medical University), China, Email: tingwen@muhn.edu.cn