Teledentistry may improve access to care for geriatric patients

The major barrier to oral health care for geriatrics is access to dental care. Teledentistry is the field of dentistry that uses telecommunication with digital imaging for the exchange of valid information for diagnosis, treatment, and continuing dental education, enabling some means of approach to oral health care. This study aimed to assess the accuracy of diagnosing dental caries in the older age group by examining intraoral photographs taken by smartphone camera compared with standard clinical dental examination.

A calibrated dentist examined 18 patients aged 60-75 for six variables: sound tooth, decayed tooth, filled tooth with and without caries, missing tooth, and the presence of prosthesis. Intraoral photographs of each patient were taken using a smartphone. The photographs were then sent to six different examiners through WhatsApp. The accuracy of the diagnosis was measured by applying Cohen's kappa, sensitivity, and specificity. Fleiss' kappa was used to measure the agreement index using the software R (R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria) version 4.2.1.

The overall agreement between the tele-examiners and the control was measured, with the kappa scores ranging from 0.897 to 0.921, and the mean kappa score was 0.909. There was high specificity and sensitivity in the value observed. The agreement index, measured through Fleiss' kappa for six teeth conditions, reported the perfect agreement (0.867) among six examiners.

Under the limitations of the study, teledentistry using a mobile phone has acceptable accuracy for diagnosing caries in the older age group compared to a standard clinical dental examination.

Reference:

Pandey P, Jasrasaria N, Bains R, et al. (January 02, 2023) The Efficacy of Dental Caries Telediagnosis Using Smartphone: A Diagnostic Study in Geriatric Patients. Cureus 15(1): e33256. doi:10.7759/cureus.33256