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OpenMouth: Leveraging AI to Enhance Fairness in Dental Clinical Research

Award Number: R01DE035094
ORGANIZATION: NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF DENTAL AND CRANIOFACIAL RESEARCH
OPDIV: NIH
AWARD CLASS: DISCRETIONARY
AWARD ACTIVITY TYPE: SCIENTIFIC/HEALTH RESEARCH (INCLUDES SURVEYS)
PERIOD OF PERFORMANCE START DATE: 07/06/2026
PERIOD OF PERFORMANCE END DATE: 03/31/2031

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OpenMouth: Leveraging AI to Enhance Fairness in Dental Clinical Research - ABSTRACT The integration of big data and artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare holds significant promise for improving evidence-based patient care, treatment outcomes, and our understanding of health and disease. While AI- enabled big data analyses have already shown potential in diagnosing conditions, monitoring patient health, and forecasting medication responses, access to comprehensive data remains limited due to concerns over data privacy and patient confidentiality regulations. Although some progress has been made with publicly accessible anonymized medical datasets like MIMIC, All of Us, and the UK Biobank, no such resource currently exists for oral health. The BigMouth Dental Data Repository – the largest clinical dental big data resource in the US – consolidates EHR data (with some identifiers) from multiple US dental institutions, offering comprehensive, longitudinal clinical data on almost 7 million patients. Despite substantial interest in this resource, data access and use have been limited due to a complex approval process that only allows access to predefined subsets. To overcome these challenges, this project aims to establish secure open access to the largest dental clinical data repository in the US, and to develop an AI-powered assistant to facilitate its use. The project will achieve its objectives through two primary aims. Aim 1 will focus on fully de-identifying BigMouth data and establishing a comprehensive data governance framework to enable open data sharing. It will also include transforming the dataset into the OMOP Common Data Model and employing privacy protection methods for feature engineering. Aim 2 involves developing the OpenMouth Researcher Workbench, a secure cloud- based data sharing platform integrated with an integrated AI assistant. This platform will support natural language-enabled querying and analysis, lowering the barrier to data access and use for researchers. Our proposal represents a groundbreaking effort in oral health research by creating the first open-access, AI- powered platform for supporting clinical dental research. By improving access to, and use of BigMouth data, the OpenMouth platform will enable new insights into oral health, its connection to systemic health, as well as treatment outcomes, and disease prevention strategies. Ultimately, this initiative seeks to foster more innovative, data-driven research in dentistry, transforming how data is accessed and utilized. This work builds on our prior work in developing the BigMouth Dental Data Repository. We will also be supported by the collective strength of the core BigMouth members, and other allied dental institutions that currently share and/or contribute data to the repository.


Issue Date FY	Funding FY	Legal Entity Name	Legal Entity Address	Legal Entity City	Legal Entity State	Legal Entity Zip Code	Legal Entity COUNTY	Legal Entity COUNTRY	Assistance Listing	Award Code	Budget Year	Action Date	Action Type	Action Amount

Issue Date FY: 2026 ( Subtotal = $721,776 )
2026	2026	UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS HEALTH SCIENCE CENTER AT HOUSTON	7000 FANNIN ST FL 9	HOUSTON	TX	77030	HARRIS	USA	Oral Diseases and Disorders Research	000	1	7/8/2026	NEW	$721,776
														Subtotal = $721,776

Grand Total All Awards = $721,776

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OpenMouth: Leveraging AI to Enhance Fairness in Dental Clinical Research

Award Number: R01DE035094

ORGANIZATION: NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF DENTAL AND CRANIOFACIAL RESEARCH

OPDIV: NIH

AWARD CLASS: DISCRETIONARY

AWARD ACTIVITY TYPE: SCIENTIFIC/HEALTH RESEARCH (INCLUDES SURVEYS)

PERIOD OF PERFORMANCE START DATE: 07/06/2026

PERIOD OF PERFORMANCE END DATE: 03/31/2031

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