Dental Age Estimation Using Deep Learning: A Comparative Survey

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

1. In the introduction you should also add that the dentist could estimate the patient's age basing on the cervical vertabrae - the cephalometric X-ray

2. Could the teeth agenesis or develompental anomalies influence the possible miscalculation of dental age? See the exaples of references:

- Calheiros-Lobo MJ, Costa F, Pinho T. Infraocclusion level and root resorption of the primary molar in second premolar agenesis: A retrospective cross-sectional study in the Portuguese population. Dent Med Probl. 2022;59(2):195–207. doi:10.17219/dmp/146256

- Paradowska-Stolarz A, Mikulewicz M, Duś-Ilnicka I. Current Concepts and Challenges in the Treatment of Cleft Lip and Palate Patients-A Comprehensive Review. J Pers Med. 2022 Dec 19;12(12):2089. doi: 10.3390/jpm12122089

- Magdalena Dubowik, Anna Paradowska, Irena Dubowik, Janina Szeląg. Comparison of Dental Age Using Demirijan's Method in Children with Cleft Lip, Alveolus and Palate with Non-Cleft Children. Dent Med Probl. 2011, vol. 48, nr 3, July-September, p. 388–392

3. Lines 69-76 are not necessary

4. Lines 92-98 -> I would expand the aspect of forensics.

5. Line 202+ - Medicine -> could age estimation be used in other situations? Eg. establishing the criminals' profile? To establish age of the person injured in the accident?

6. I wo8uld add a chapter on how genetics could hhelp to estimate the individual's age?

After applying those changes, the article deserves publishing as a high-rigted article

 

Author Response

we would like to express our gratitude to you, for providing valuable comments on this paper, which significantly improved its quality. 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

This paper presents a survey on works to estimate dental age.  Yet, there are some suggestions for improvements:

1) There are some typos and minor grammatical mistakes.  Please proof-read before re-submission.

2) This paper has many sections and subsections, but most of them only have one single paragraph.  Better to add more elaboration per section or subsection.

3) Would be better if the survey just concentrate on dental.  My suggestion is to simplified the content from Section 2 and incorporate it into Section 1 (by doing so, we can remove Section 2).

4) Section 3, better to only emphasize the application of dental age.  Currently, this section seems general.

5) The figures in Section 4 are mostly from other sources.  Please make sure that there would be no copyright issue.

6) Some of the figures are not clear.  Please provide better quality images.

7) More discussions on the figure should be provided. For example, for Figure 2, what are the differences between the stages?

8) Section 5 only discuss about CNN and its other architecture variations.  In my opinion, better to add directly into this section, the applications of these architectures for dental age estimation.  My suggestion is to combine Section 5 with Section 6.

9) Section 7 needs more details on the images.  For examples, what type of images in those dataset, CT, MRI or optical images?  What are the image resolution (size)?  What are the image format?  Whether it is color or grayscale, and the bit-depth of the image.

10) For Section 7, better to also list down researchers who use these datasets.  For these researchers, how many images are used for the training, validation, and testing?

 

 

Author Response

we would like to express our gratitude to you, for providing valuable comments on this paper, which significantly improved its quality. 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

- Type of paper is review, not an article, please correct

  - L 24-35 please add a reference   - Please define the period of this review (year-year) and which databases were used   - L 80-82: recent studies without references, please add the references   - Figure 1: is an original figure or took from other paper, if not original, the authors need an authorization   - Figures 2-7: with authorizations?   - Please respect the same style of text in all the figures and tables   - Some spaces are recommended through the text   - Please clarify the perspectives and more details in the conclusions which reflect the idea of the review   - All the references should be written following MDPI style

Author Response

we would like to express our gratitude to you, for providing valuable comments on this paper, which significantly improved its quality. 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors have modified the paper based on my previous comments. Yet, there are some minor comments for further improvements:

1) Please check the format for the beginning of the paragraph. For line 47, there is a line spacing and a gap, but for line 24 (for example), there are no line spacing and gap. PLease be consistent.

2) Citations number should be in increasing order. Please correct the citation numbers on the second paragraph of Section 1.

3) Please put a space before citation. For example, on line 32, put a space before "[121]".

4) Figures, such as Figure 1, are still blurry.

5) Section 4 is still short. More critical analysis on Table 3 should be given in this section.

Author Response

We reviewed the manuscript carefully. Thank you for all the comments

Author Response File: Author Response.docx