Muhammad Rizwan Nazeer
Dentist, Pakistan
Title: In vitro assessment of the Accuracy of extraoral method of root length determination
Biography
Biography: Muhammad Rizwan Nazeer
Abstract
Background: Radiographic examination is one of the primary diagnostic tools used in dentistry. In some patients, obtaining a correct intraoral periapical radiograph can be very difficult. These include individuals with severe gag reflex, pediatric patients who are reluctant to intraoral film placement, patients with macroglossia or microstomia, post radiation therapy patients with trismus or patients with limited sulcus depth etc. For such patients, recently an alternative technique was suggested in which periapical radiographs were taken by using extraoral approach. The purpose of our study is to evaluate the accuracy of extra oral periapical radiograph for determining working length by comparing it with two other sets of radiograph obtained with intraoral approaches.
Objective: To determine the accuracy of extra oral periapical radiography in obtaining root length by comparing it with the radiographs obtained from standard intraoral approach and extended distance intraoral approach.
Methods: It was an in-vitro, comparative study conducted at the dental clinics of AKUH. ERC exemption was obtained for this work, ref # 3407Sur-ERC-14. We included premolars and molars of a standard Phantom head mounted with metal and radiopaque teeth. Radiation was exposed using three radiographic approaches: standard intraoral, extended length intraoral and extra oral. Since, the unit of analysis was individual root, thus, we had a total of 36 images. The images were stored in VinWix software already installed in our clinic setup. The length of the roots was determined using the scale function of the measuring tool inbuilt in the software. Data was analyzed using SPSS version 19.0 and Graph Pad software. Pearson correlation coefficient and Bland-Altman test was applied to determine whether the tooth length readings obtained from three different approaches were correlated. A p-value of 0.05 was taken as statistically significant.
Results: The correlation between standard intraoral & extended intraoral was 0.97; correlation between standard intraoral & extraoral method was 0.82 while correlation between extended intraoral & extraoral was 0.76. The results of Bland Altman test showed that the average discrepancy between these methods is not large enough to be considered as significant.
Conclusions: It appears that the extra oral radiographic method can be used in root length determination in subjects where intraoral radiography is not possible.