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Most case studies begin with a practitioner who adopted a product and saw results. This one begins differently.
.Dr. Sergio Irazusta did not adopt scanO as a clinical tool. He brought it into an academic environment as an object of serious scientific scrutiny, to be studied, evaluated, and tested against the rigour of peer-reviewed research. The research framework is now in place, marking the beginning of an independent academic evaluation of the technology.
What makes this case study significant is not what scanO has already proven at UIC Barcelona. It is what a world-ranked dental university, led by one of Europe's most credible AI-in-dentistry voices, believes is worth proving.
That is a different kind of endorsement and arguably a more meaningful one.
UIC Barcelona ranks 36th globally in Dentistry in the QS World University Rankings by Subject 2026, placing it in the global Top 40 in the discipline, its best recent result in this ranking. At national level, it ranks second among five Spanish universities listed, and first among private universities.
Within that institution, Dr. Sergio Irazusta occupies a specific and unusual position. He is a clinical endodontist with exclusive dedication to the specialty, practicing at CambraClinic in Barcelona and Cabinet Dentaire Turcarelli in Luxembourg. Since 2018 he has been a Professor at UIC Barcelona, teaching in both the undergraduate dental degree and the European Master's in Endodontology. He is a Specialist Member of the European Society of Endodontology.
And he is, at the same time, one of Spain's most active voices on AI in dentistry. He co-teaches a dedicated AI in Dentistry course, now in its second edition, with enrollment doubled. He is a member of the American Academy of Artificial Intelligence in Dentistry. He serves as its Regional Ambassador for Spain for 2026–2027. His research line includes AI-assisted radiographic diagnosis.
This is not someone who encounters AI casually. This is someone who has built an academic and research identity around understanding what AI can and cannot do in clinical dentistry. When he evaluates a tool, he does so with the full weight of that expertise behind him.
Before scanO entered the conversation, Dr. Irazusta had already articulated the problem that AI-assisted screening is designed to address. His setting relies on conventional clinical examination, visual inspection, probing, standardised indices like ICDAS II for carie, supported by radiographs.
It is reliable. It is evidence-based. And it has two structural weaknesses he names with precision:
Inter-examiner variability. Scalability. These are not marketing problems. They are clinical problems that have been documented in the literature for decades, and that every dental institution running high-volume education faces daily.
scanO's value proposition, in this context, is not that it is better than a trained examiner. It provides a consistent, scalable, operator-independent first pass, the kind of triage layer that makes population-level screening possible in ways that conventional examination alone cannot achieve.
The entry point was deliberate and academically framed from the beginning.
It was integrated into two contexts. The first was the AI in Dentistry course, students were introduced to the tool as part of a hands-on familiarisation exercise, experiencing it directly and comparing its outputs with their own clinical reasoning. The second was a formal research protocol within the Master's in Endodontology, designed to evaluate scanO's diagnostic concordance against clinical examination with ICDAS II as the reference standard.
Neither context was passive. Both were structured, purposeful, and tied to academic output.
The most interesting educational insight from Dr. Irazusta is not about what scanO gets right. It is about what happens when it disagrees with the student.
This is the observation of someone who has thought deeply about how AI should be taught, not just used. The instinct in dental education is often to ask whether a tool is accurate enough to trust. Dr. Irazusta asks a different question: does the tool make the student think more rigorously?
The answer, in his observation, is yes. When a student's own examination diverges from the AI's output, they are forced to defend their reasoning, to examine their own diagnostic process with a critical eye they would not otherwise apply. The AI becomes a pedagogical instrument, not just a screening one.
Student engagement in the familiarisation exercises has been high. Their own performance with the tool has been strong. But the goal, in Dr. Irazusta's framing, is not confidence in AI. It is the kind of calibrated, contextual judgment that separates a competent clinician from an excellent one.
The most significant development at UIC Barcelona is not what has happened in the classroom. It is what is happening in the laboratory.
An active multi-institutional research line is now underway, with Master's in Endodontology students as investigators. Two parallel single-centre studies are running simultaneously, one at UIC Barcelona and one at the Universidad de Monterrey (UDEM) in Mexico. Both are evaluating scanO's diagnostic concordance against clinical examination, using ICDAS II as the reference standard. The Monterrey design additionally incorporates radiographic validation of findings.
Both studies are under review by their respective ethics committees.
The research outcomes Dr. Irazusta is seeking are specific and methodologically precise:
Sensitivity. Specificity. Positive and negative predictive value. Subgroup analysis by lesion stage and tooth location. This is not the language of a casual product evaluation. This is the methodology of a researcher who intends to produce findings that will withstand peer review.
For scanO, this represents something rare and genuinely valuable: an independent, rigorous, ethics-committee-approved clinical validation study at a globally ranked dental university, designed with the explicit goal of producing credible published evidence about the tool's diagnostic performance.
Dr. Irazusta's responses throughout this case study are characterised by something unusual in testimonials: he says exactly what he does not know yet, and exactly why.
When asked whether scanO has contributed to improved early detection, he declines to give examples before the data is in.
When asked about case conversion and adoption, he identifies the real barriers without softening them:
And his request for improvement is equally direct: more transparent technical documentation, clarity on what the model is optimised for, GDPR-compatible deployment options for European settings, and traceability of AI outputs so clinicians understand the basis for predictions, not just the result.
This honesty is not a limitation of the case study. It is its most credible feature. A researcher of Dr. Irazusta's standing who vouches for something prematurely loses the authority that makes his eventual endorsement meaningful. His measured, rigorous approach is precisely what gives this collaboration its scientific weight.
When asked what a successful collaboration between UIC Barcelona and scanO would look like, Dr. Irazusta's answer defines the terms clearly.
And on co-authorship and publication:
This is the standard that peer-reviewed science demands. And it is exactly the standard a company that believes in its product's clinical value should welcome. The independence of the evaluator is what transforms a study's findings, positive or negative, into something the global dental community will take seriously.
scanO is deployed across 1,000+ clinics in India, the UAE, the UK, Singapore, and Malaysia. The tool has been validated through real-world clinical use, thousands of patient interactions, and dozens of practitioner case studies across Asia and the Middle East.
What has been missing until now is the kind of academic, peer-reviewed, European-standard clinical validation that allows the global dental research community to evaluate the evidence independently.
That is what is being built at UIC Barcelona.
With UIC Barcelona achieving its best-ever ranking result in Dentistry, 36th globally in the QS 2026 rankings and with Dr. Irazusta serving as Spain's Regional Ambassador for AI in Dentistry, the institution and the researcher bring a credibility that extends well beyond Spain. A published concordance study from UIC Barcelona and UDEM, appearing in a peer-reviewed endodontics or dental research journal, will be read by faculty and practitioners across Europe, Latin America, and beyond.
That is the reach of independent academic validation. And it starts with a researcher who was willing to look at a tool seriously and design a study to find out what it actually does.
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