Detecting and monitoring dental plaque is an important issue in research and clinical practice. In this context, new digital imaging methods that permit permanent documentation of the clinical findings could be promising tools. The aim of the study was therefore to investigate whether disclosed plaque can be reliably visualised on 2D and 3D images captured with digital intraoral imaging devices.
Clinical examination was the reference method. Twenty subjects At each time point, plaque was disclosed followed by the clinical examination and capturing the 2D and 3D images intraoral-camera CS and intraoral-scanner CS ; Carestream Dental, Germany. After toothbrushing T3 , values decreased to All methods were able to show statistically significant changes in plaque amounts at the different time points with in part statistically significant but minor differences between them.
The Bland-Altmann analysis revealed a good agreement between values from both 2D and 3D images with the clinical examination.
The agreement of the scores obtained with the both image-based methods for the single RMNPI areas with the clinical examination was mainly classified as substantial to almost perfect. Amounts of plaque can be reliably detected and monitored on 2D images from an intraoral camera and on 3D images from an intraoral scanner. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Data Availability: All relevant data are within the manuscript and its Supporting information files. Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
