DENTAL WEBINAR: Multidisciplinary Team Care for Cleft Lip and Palate in Africa

This session focused on a presentation by Dr. Shanel Raghubeer regarding the role of artificial intelligence in laboratory medicine, specifically concerning evidence, bias, and ethical risks in African healthcare. She explained that AI, machine learning, and deep learning are already being integrated into diagnostics, but warned that models trained on European and North American datasets often fail in African settings due to differences in epidemiology, infrastructure, and population characteristics. She also highlighted the need for external validation in local populations and cited examples like pulse oximeters and genomic underrepresentation to illustrate how non-representative data leads to health inequities. The discussion covered ethical challenges such as data ownership, informed consent, and the risk of widening the gap between well-resourced and underserved healthcare systems.