Development and Comparative Evaluation of a Reinstructed GPT-4o Model Specialized in Periodontology

Background: Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to enhance healthcare practices, including periodontology, by improving diagnostics, treatment planning and patient care. This study introduces 'PerioGPT', a specialized AI model designed to provide up-to-date periodontal knowledge using GPT-4o and a novel retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system. Methods: PerioGPT was evaluated in two phases. First, its performance was compared against those of five other chatbots using 50 periodontal questions from specialists, followed by a validation with 71 questions from the 2023-2024 'In-Service Examination' of the American Academy of Periodontology (AAP). The second phase focused on assessing PerioGPT's generative capacity, specifically its ability to create complex and accurate periodontal questions. Results: PerioGPT outperformed other chatbots, achieving a higher accuracy rate (81.16%) and generating more complex and precise questions with a mean complexity score of 3.81 ± 0.965 and an accuracy score of 4.35 ± 0.898. These results demonstrate PerioGPT's potential as a leading tool for creating reliable clinical queries in periodontology. Conclusions: This study underscores the transformative potential of AI in periodontology, illustrating that specialized models can offer significant advantages over general language models for both educational and clinical applications. The findings highlight that tailoring AI technologies to specific medical fields may improve performance and relevance.