A recent study published in the Journal of Dentistry introduces an automated method for efficiently monitoring tooth wear progression through full-arch intraoral scanning (IOS). This research aimed to develop and assess a fully automated approach for visualizing and measuring tooth wear, comparing it against traditional manual protocols.
The study involved eight patients with significant tooth wear, utilizing IOSs taken at baseline and follow-ups at 1, 3, and 5 years. To align the scans, the automated method segmented the dental arch into individual teeth. It then selected surfaces less affected by wear for accurate point set registration.
Tooth profile losses were calculated from baseline to each follow-up using both the manual 3D Wear Analysis (3DWA) protocol and the automated method. The effectiveness of the automated system was evaluated by comparing the segmentations using the Dice-Sørensen coefficient (DSC) and intersection over union (IoU). Measurements of tooth profile loss were further analyzed using regression and Bland-Altman plots to assess the correlation between the two methods.
The automated process completed in under two minutes, demonstrating high effectiveness in tooth instance segmentation (826 teeth, DSC = 0.947, IoU = 0.907). A strong correlation of 0.932 was found in tooth profile loss measurements across 516 tooth pairs, with a mean difference of 0.021 mm and a 95% confidence interval of [-0.085, 0.138]. Interestingly, variability in measurement differences increased with longer time intervals.
The findings indicate that the automated method not only outperformed the manual approach in terms of time efficiency but also maintained comparable accuracy, which is not clinically significant. This innovation offers both general practitioners and patients a valuable tool for visualizing tooth wear, facilitating quantifiable and standardized decisions regarding the treatment of worn teeth. By reducing monitoring time from at least two hours to less than two minutes, this method stands to enhance the efficiency of dental care.
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