Pearlii

Free, fast dental check-ups using AI image processing

48 followers

Free, fast dental check-ups using AI image processing

48 followers

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Health & Fitness

We believe dental check-ups should be free, fast and more accessible - not a privilege. Pearlii uses AI image processing to scan dental photos, taken at home with your smartphone camera. Download our beta App, please share your feedback 💕

Launch tags:Android•Health & Fitness•Artificial Intelligence

Launch Team

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Pearlii

Maker

Pearlii is an investor-backed, dentaltech startup in Melbourne, Australia. Personally - I've got shit teeth. I grew up in a lower-socioeconomic household in outback Australia. I've since learned that almost all dental problems are preventable with regular check-ups and good oral hygiene, so I'm now scrupulous about my oral health, but a lot of damage was already done. With Pearlii, I'm trying to prevent this happening to anyone else. Healthy teeth shouldn't be a privilege and no kid should have to grow up with bad teeth. A free dental screening and education app like Pearlii has the potential to shift the landscape, spotting problems earlier and boosting oral health literacy. Pearlii is still in beta mode, but we have big plans - so please follow our story. In future, we will add many more features, such as scanning for more and more oral diseases, adding rich educational content created by our Dentists, tracking your teeth whitening and straightening, while the ultimate goal is to create seamless referral pathways (e.g. book a dentist appointment). So, while we understand that we still have loads of work to do, now is a good time to start collecting real feedback from Users. And where else better than Product Hunt? :)

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6yr ago

@kyle_t awesome idea!

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6yr ago

@kyle_t Hi Kyle, First of all congratulation to you, and to the whole Pearlii team. I am documenting journey of individuals who are innovating, inventing, and creating things in general, through out the world. The proposal is to do a short interview, capture it in video, and let it out to the world, so that others can get inspiration. And, at the same time you and your team will get acknowledgement for the hustle. I would like to request you to please let me know when you are available so that we can discuss this in more detail at tellmeaboutit510{at}gmail.com . Thanks, and good luck! Subodh

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6yr ago

Pearlii

Maker

@subodh__ thanks Subodh! I'll drop you a quick email now :)

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6yr ago

@kyle_t congratulations to you and the team for coming up with such a brilliant app for dental health. Being a dentist I know that people avoid treatments unless there is a pain but with such a great app they will be motivated to get routine checkups with just a click. Current world is tech-savvy and with "Pearlii" for oral health we can do a lot to prevent oral and maxillofacial disease.Looking forward to bright future for dentistry and would love to contribute in development of this dental technology in the best possible way.

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6yr ago

Pearlii

Maker

@nidhi_jani Hi Nidhi - thank you for such a wonderful comment! Please continue to follow our story :)

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6yr ago

How does this app recognise hidden caries? My wife is a dentist and when I showed her this post and the video, that was her first question. If that's not detected by the app and someone acctually has caries, but everything else is fine, the app might be misleading and postponing the vist of the dentist making the situation even worst. I'm really courious about this question. I'm not really representative person to test the app as I do not have a single filling.

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6yr ago

Pearlii

Maker

@gregor_goslar Hi Gregor, great question! I would like to first note that I'm an epidemiologist by trade and a lecturer in public health at the University of Melbourne. I'm committed to doing this responsibly - improving access to dental screening and education is why I started Pearlii. Secondly, I want to stress that this is just our beta. We're setting up validity and reliability clinical trials to be run through the University of Melbourne Dental School to fully understand our tech's capabilities and limitations. We have two dentists working at Pearlii, while we're regularly in touch with peak dental bodies here in Australia. We've also tried to be really careful with the language we use in the App so to not overstate - particularly as we're only in beta mode. Pearlii will always promote going to the Dentist in person as the gold standard. This said, it's important to know that many people only go to the dentist once they experience pain or clear signs of damage, and they miss the prevention window. For example, in Australia 65% of adults have not been to the dentist in the last two years. It is a huge, underserved, and costly public health problem in many countries around the world. For comparison, perhaps look at the success of mental health apps - many with +50m downloads - people generally know that visiting a psychologist in person is the gold standard. However, it is expensive, inconvenient, and has some associated stigma / fear, so many people don't bother going at all. Dentistry has very similar barriers; it costs on average US$288 for dental check-ups and it takes hours out of a persons day, not to mention the associated fear / distrust towards dentists. While not perfect, Pearlii goes some way to overcoming all of these barriers. I can go on and on about the failures in today's public dental system, but Pearlii will offer people worldwide - importantly those who don't go to the dentist (for whatever reason) - free, fast and convenient dental screening and education. I should also note that our early machine learning results are exceeding our earlier expectations. It's really amazing what we're able to detect from five dental photos taken with a smartphone (in future, I plan to also nerd out and hopefully build a composite score combining our ML and oral health questionnaire results to strengthen overall dental assessments). We've got loads of other exciting stuff planned, such as low-cost dental screening and education programs, such as in schools and rural and remote communities. But that's probably enough info for one reply! I hope this goes some way to answering your questions, Gregor.

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6yr ago

@kyle_t thank's for your answer. I think you are developing a great app, don't get me wrong on that. And even if it can't detect caries, but does detect gingivitis (which is a problem of over 80% of the population above 60) and advises people to visit their dentist, then the app has done a great job.

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6yr ago

Pearlii

Maker

@gregor_goslar Thanks Gregor, really appreciate the words of encouragement! Regarding detection of occlusal caries (decay hidden in between teeth), you're correct that these types of caries are much trickier to detect than surface caries - our questionnaire asks about related symptoms, such as sensitivity to hot or cold temperatures, but we're unlikely to detect early stages of occlusal caries. However, it's worth noting that occlusal caries are also quite challenging for dentists to detect too, even with x-ray. They are usually only reported once they're at moderate to advanced stages. Happy to share links to peer-reviewed literature for more detail.

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6yr ago

Is it just me? The floating action button doesn't work at all for me. App is unuseable on Google Pixel 3 :(

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6yr ago

Pearlii

Maker

@ayoolajohn_ Hi Ayoola - nope, it's not just you! Sorry about this bug, we had 10-20 people notify us yesterday about the same issue. It's related to cognito. We released a patch last night, which should hopefully fix it for now (until we do a proper redo of our registration). Again, very sorry about this - please stick with us! We really value your patience :)

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6yr ago

@kyle_t Hey Kyle, thanks. I updated and tried again and it worked. :)

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6yr ago

Pearlii

Maker

@ayoolajohn_ woohoo! (phew)

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6yr ago

Hi Kyle, very interesting to see, really good idea! How reliable is the outcome? How did you validate that?

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6yr ago

Pearlii

Maker

@olena_ishuk thanks Elena! And great questions. We're actually setting up validity and reliability clinical trials here in Melbourne to compare our dental image detection against a standard 'in the chair' exam, with and without x-ray. This'll take some time. But it's worth also noting that all images in our ML training data set were labelled independently by two dentists and we're always running QA on old ML outputs. This is only our beta version, which we state in many places, but the early results have far exceeded our expectations - the model appears to be particularly strong at dental caries (decay) detection, but this needs further testing in a closed clinical setting. I'm actually an epidemiologist, so naturally I want to test, test, test! Please follow our growth Elena :)

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6yr ago

@kyle_t thanks Kyle! it sounds like a great tool, I am looking forward to test it. Do you plan iOS version as well? I've tried to find Android between close friends/family to test the App, and it turned out everybody uses iPhone.

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6yr ago

Pearlii

Maker

@olena_ishuk Ha, sorry about that. Yes, an iOS version will be available in 2-3 weeks, we just want to improve the Results section in our current Android version before duplicating - we've learned a lot from early users in the last 10 days. Thank you for your patience Elena!

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6yr ago

great stuff. What would you say where your most expertise is? Are you having a good back-end data regarding dentures and implant diagnosis?

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6yr ago

Pearlii

Maker

@ramtin1 thanks, Ramtin! I can confidently say that surface caries (tooth decay) and white spots (signs of early decay) is where our model is best performing. We've got two dentists in the Pearlii Team, but we haven't yet labelled for dentures and implants (on the list!). To date, our dentists have focused on dental caries (decay) and white spots, and more recently gingivitis and calculus, while we're also now annotating a test data set for staining. I hope this goes some way to answering your question. Please follow our progress, Ramtin! :)

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6yr ago

@kyle_t , Hi Kyle, hope all well. I am interested in your progress :-)... we are expanding in several cities with our Implant treatment service . I would love to speak to you...maybe you add me on skype : ramtin551. best

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6yr ago

Excited to try this out! I went on the website and tried to join the mailing list, but got an invalid mailchimp token. Could you make sure joshbaek@sas.upenn.edu is on there? Thank you!

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6yr ago

Pearlii

Maker

@sas @joshua_baek Thanks for reaching out. We really appreciate your support :) Yes, guilty as charged! We're currently rebuilding our website - please give us 1-2 days. Our to do list right now just seems to be getting longer and longer! I have added your email manually. Thanks again for taking the time to email us about this bug. Please stick with us - we really appreciate your patience!

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6yr ago

Kyle- Like minds! This has been on my mind for years. We conducted a survey here in the USA in 2017 that clearly confirmed fear, pain, cost and inconvenience keep people from seeing the dentist. People know dentistry is important but they find excuses not to make it a priority. People need a convenient way to inform themselves as to what's happening in their mouths and Pearlii seems like the perfect tool/service to lower the barrier and inform them. What are your plans for the USA? How can I help?

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6yr ago

Pearlii

Maker

@brimccarthy Thanks Brian! We're focused on building our tech in Australia currently, running some clinical trials, etc. But US is top of the list for where we want to go next :)

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6yr ago

@kyle_t Thanks for the reply. Very happy to assist when you make it state-side. Sent you a LinkedIn connection request as well. Best,

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6yr ago

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