Robust Estimation of the Chronological Age of Children and Adolescents Using Tooth Geometry Indicators and POD-GP

Katarzyna Zaborowicz, Tomasz Garbowski, Barbara Biedziak and Maciej Zaborowicz
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Katarzyna Zaborowicz: Department of Orthodontics and Craniofacial Anomalies, Poznań University of Medical Sciences, Collegium Maius, Fredry 10, 61-701 Poznan, Poland
Tomasz Garbowski: Department of Biosystems Engineering, Poznan University of Life Sciences, Wojska Polskiego 50, 60-627 Poznan, Poland
Barbara Biedziak: Department of Orthodontics and Craniofacial Anomalies, Poznań University of Medical Sciences, Collegium Maius, Fredry 10, 61-701 Poznan, Poland
Maciej Zaborowicz: Department of Biosystems Engineering, Poznan University of Life Sciences, Wojska Polskiego 50, 60-627 Poznan, Poland

IJERPH, 2022, vol. 19, issue 5, 1-14

Abstract: Determining the chronological age of children or adolescents is becoming an extremely necessary and important issue. Correct age-assessment methods are especially important in the process of international adoption and in the case of immigrants without valid documents confirming their identity. It is well known that traditional, analog methods widely used in clinical evaluation are burdened with a high error rate and are characterized by low accuracy. On the other hand, new digital approaches appear in medicine more and more often, which allow the increase of the accuracy of these estimates, and thus equip doctors with a tool for reliable estimation of the chronological age of children and adolescents. In this study, the work on a fast and effective metamodel is continued. Metamodels have one great advantage over all other analog and quasidigital methods—if they are well trained, a priori, on a representative set of samples, then in the age-assessment phase, results are obtained in a fraction of a second and with little error (reduced to ± 7.5 months). In the here-proposed method, the standard deviation for each estimate is additionally obtained, which allows the assessment of the certainty of each result. In this study, 619 pantomographic photos of 619 patients (296 girls and 323 boys) of different ages were used. In the numerical procedure, on the other hand, a metamodel based on the Proper Orthogonal Decomposition (POD) and Gaussian processes (GP) were utilized. The accuracy of the trained model was up to 95%.

Keywords: chronological age; dental age; age assessment; digital pantomography; digital image analysis; artificial intelligence; Gaussian processes; proper orthogonal decomposition (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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