Comparison of early caries diagnosis methods

Relevance. The question of diagnosing tooth decay and, thus, determining treatment methods is still very topical. There is a large number of techniques available for the diagnosis of dental caries in modern dentistry.Objective. The study aimed to compare different caries diagnosis methods to determine the most effective carious lesion detection.Material and methods. We examined in total 45 subjects, 1248 permanent teeth and 5700 tooth surfaces. The dental examination included three diagnostic techniques for each patient: visual-tactile, ICDAS II and quantitative light-induced fluorescence (QLF). The data were processed and presented graphically using Statistica 12.0 (Stat-Soft) and Microsoft Office Excel 2017 software.Results. According to the DMFS index, in the visual-tactile group, the "D" (decayed) was 3.00 ± 0.02 and the "F" (filled) was 1.93 ± 0.02. Caries intensity in this study group was 6.27 ± 0.58. The ICDAS II examination detected the average caries intensity of 6.93 ± 0.56 (p1-2 < 0.001). There were 3.47 ± 0.02 (p1-2 < 0.001) carious lesions. The "F" score was 2.13 ± 0.01 (p1-2 = 0.024). The QLF diagnostic method showed 7.44 ± 0.54 (p1-3 < 0.001, p2-3 = 0.006) as the mean intensity of caries in permanent teeth; there were 3.84 ± 0.02 (p1-3 < 0.001, p2-3 = 0.015) carious lesions and the "F" was 2.27 ± 0.01 (p1-3 = 0.018, p2-3 = 0.520). The "M" score was 0.27 ± 0.01 (p1-2 = 0.999, p1-3 = 0.999, p2-3 = 0.999), according to all applied techniques.Conclusion. The QLF method had the highest sensitivity and was superior to the visual-tactile method and ICDAS II.