What is it about?
Cleft lip and cleft palate are conditions that affect the way a child’s lip and mouth develop before birth. Children born with these conditions often need care from many specialists, including surgeons, dentists, orthodontists, speech therapists, and psychologists. Treatment usually starts in infancy and continues into adolescence or adulthood. This review explains how cleft lip and palate are treated today, using modern medical and dental approaches. It describes the role of surgery, orthodontic treatment, speech therapy, and long-term follow-up, all of which are important for improving appearance, speech, eating, and quality of life. The article also explains how artificial intelligence (AI) is beginning to support cleft care. AI does not replace doctors. Instead, it helps clinicians by analyzing medical images, predicting growth and treatment outcomes, assisting in treatment planning, and improving coordination between specialists. These tools may help make care more accurate, personalized, and efficient. Overall, this review shows how combining experienced clinical care with emerging AI-based tools can improve decision-making and long-term outcomes for patients with cleft lip and palate, while keeping the clinician at the center of care.
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Why is it important?
Cleft lip and palate affect children’s appearance, speech, eating, hearing, and emotional well-being, often from birth into adulthood. Care is complex and long-term, involving many specialists and multiple treatment stages. Small decisions made early can have lifelong effects. This review is important because it brings together current clinical care and new digital tools in one place. While artificial intelligence is being used more often in healthcare, many clinicians and families are unsure how it fits into real-world cleft care. This article explains where AI can genuinely help—such as improving diagnosis, planning treatment, and predicting outcomes—without replacing clinical judgement. By clearly outlining both the benefits and limitations of AI, the review helps clinicians use technology responsibly, supports better teamwork across specialties, and encourages safer, more personalized care for patients. Ultimately, understanding how modern treatment and AI work together can help improve long-term outcomes and quality of life for individuals born with cleft lip and palate.
Perspectives
From my experience as a clinician and educator involved in the long-term care of patients with cleft lip and palate, one of the greatest challenges is not the lack of treatment options, but the need to make the right decisions at the right time. Cleft care spans many years and involves multiple specialists, and even small variations in diagnosis or timing can influence facial growth, function, and quality of life. I see artificial intelligence as a supportive clinical tool, not a replacement for clinical expertise. When used appropriately, AI has the potential to improve consistency in diagnosis, assist in treatment planning, and help predict outcomes in ways that are difficult to achieve through human judgement alone—particularly in complex, multidisciplinary cases. At the same time, AI must be used cautiously, with full awareness of its limitations, data biases, and ethical responsibilities. In my view, the future of cleft care lies in a balanced integration of experience-driven clinical judgement and data-driven decision support. Technology should enhance collaboration among surgeons, orthodontists, speech therapists, and other team members, while keeping the patient and family at the center of care. By adopting AI thoughtfully and responsibly, we have an opportunity to improve precision, equity, and long-term outcomes in cleft lip and palate management.
Anand Marya
University of Puthisastra
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The Contemporary Management of Cleft Lip and Palate and the Role of Artificial Intelligence: A Review, The Open Dentistry Journal, June 2022, Bentham Science Publishers,
DOI: 10.2174/18742106-v16-e2202240.
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