Abstract
Aim: To assess intraobserver and interobserver agreement for radiographic detection of approximal caries among dentists, senior’s dental students and radiologists. Materials and methods: 75 standardized bitewing radiographs were examined by four maxillofacial radiologist, four dentist and four senior dental students. Interobserver agreement was calculated using a weighted Kappa Cohen test. Two weeks later, the examiners re-evaluated 10% of the sample under the same conditions and intraobserver agreement weighted Kappa Cohen test were calculated.Results: The interobserver Kappa value was 0.68 (good) for the dentist-student pair, 0.51 (moderate) for the student-radiologist and 0.62 (good) for the dentist-radiologist pair. All these differences were significant. The intraobserver agreement Kappa values obtained were 0.56 (moderate) for students (p=0.46), 0.46 (moderate) for dentist (p<0.05) and 0.68 (good) for radiologist.Conclusion: The agreement for proximal caries detection by dental students, dentists and radiologist was moderate to good.
Highlights
Radiographic caries detection allows to evaluate areas that are difficult to assess clinically, approximal surfaces, facilitating the decision-making process[1]
While the validity of results is measured by sensitivity and specificity, reliability is usually expressed in terms of intraobserver and interobserver agreement, generally using Kappa statistic[3]
While the validity of bitewing radiography has been extensively studied, with more than 168 publications available in PubMed to date[4], there are only a few papers assessing the agreement for radiographic detection of caries
Summary
Radiographic caries detection allows to evaluate areas that are difficult to assess clinically, approximal surfaces, facilitating the decision-making process[1]. While the validity of bitewing radiography has been extensively studied, with more than 168 publications available in PubMed to date[4], there are only a few papers assessing the agreement for radiographic detection of caries. Some publications available from 1997 to date have assessed the agreement on the use of bitewing radiographs and panoramic radiographs to evaluate approximal caries[5]; on the use of high and low resolution radiographs[6], on direct or indirect digital radiographs[7], conventional or digital[8], and on the use of bitewing and oblique lateral radiographs[9]. Recent publications report on the diagnostic agreement for the clinical evaluation of caries[11], or between clinical and radiographic evaluation[12], there are no publications repor-
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