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Digital Health: Intervention and Monitoring in Oral Health

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A special issue of Healthcare (ISSN 2227-9032). This special issue belongs to the section "TeleHealth and Digital Healthcare".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 March 2023) | Viewed by 18724

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Special Issue Editors

Dr. Alessandro Nota

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Guest Editor

Dental School, Vita-Salute San Raffaele University and IRCCS San Raffaele Hospital, via Olgettina 58, 20132 Milan, Italy
Interests: orthodontics; temporomandibular disorders; oral hygiene; growing subjects; digital orthodontics; functional orthodontic appliances
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Prof. Dr. Simona Tecco

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor

Dental School, Vita-Salute San Raffaele University and IRCCS San Raffaele Hospital, via Olgettina 58, 20132 Milan, Italy
Interests: interceptive orthodontics; oral hygiene; functional orthodontic appliances; orthodontic materials; temporomandibular disorders; digital orthodontics
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Recent years have seen an increased use of digital technologies as an aid in dental therapies. The increasing novelties in digital dentistry have led to improved diagnosis and treatment while improving efficiency and communication between the patient and the clinician.

For example, interesting novelties were developed in the prosthetics and TMD fields where high-technological devices for the prosthetic rehabilitation guided by a repositioning of the mandible and of the condyle or for the cinematic analysis of the mandibular movements were introduced to clinics and research. In the orthodontic field, digital solutions are continuously replacing traditional devices, for example, for clear aligner therapy or for customized orthodontic bands and appliances. Surgical planning for implant surgery, orthognathic surgery or miniscrew placement is becoming a standard in daily clinical practice.

Some important technological developments have also arrived in the field of telemedicine and were distributed widely by the COVID-19 pandemic, which required an increase of the remote monitoring of patients’ health status. Regarding teledentistry, some appliances allow a continuous remote monitoring of the oral health status, reducing the need of a direct control in the dental office.

This approach is particularly useful in the orthodontic and dental hygiene/periodontal field. The time lapse between periodical controls of orthodontic patients undergoing digital treatment with clear aligners can even be increased to 2–3 months, while the patient can be assisted with even higher attention as a weekly check of the orthodontic movements can be performed. On the other hand, subjects with unstable control of the dental hygiene level or periodontal tissues inflammation can be inserted in a personalized plan of remote follow-up.

The development and integration of artificial intelligence are also improving these digital technologies, opening new perspectives regarding higher precision and reduced time effort in all dental fields.

The scientific literature is continuously developing in the field of diagnosis and therapy with digital technologies, but the need for literature evidence regarding new technologies is continuously increasing as well. On the other hand, remote digital monitoring is still an undiscovered field in the scientific literature, and the development of new studies is strongly encouraged.

The aim of the present Special Issue is to promote a development of the scientific literature in order to give a complete perspective of the positive and negative aspects of the digital revolution, as well as an idea of the precision and reliability of these techniques. Original manuscripts with scientific relevance in the form of original research articles, reviews or high-quality case reports on new techniques or clinical solutions are accepted for submission.

Dr. Alessandro Nota
Prof. Dr. Simona Tecco
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Healthcare is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

digital dentistry
teledentistry
digital orthodontics
clear aligners
digital planning
oral health remote monitoring
artificial intelligence

Published Papers (6 papers)

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Research

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11 pages, 1246 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Cervical Range of Motion Analysis Performed with an Accelerometer: A Study of Intersession Reliability for Dental Practice

by Alessandro Nota, Laura Pittari, Laura Gamba, Francesco Manfredi Monticciolo, Alessia Lannes, Carlotta Carta, Alessandro Beraldi, Alberto Baldini, Giuseppe Marzo and Simona Tecco

Healthcare 2023, 11(10), 1428; https://doi.org/10.3390/healthcare11101428 - 15 May 2023

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1177

Abstract

During the clinical examination of subjects with temporomandibular disorders (TMDs), the dentist sometimes must evaluate the cervical spine, due to the anatomical and functional connections between the cervical portion of the spine and the stomatognathic apparatus. The accelerometer is a device that evaluates the Range of Motion (ROM) of the main movements of the head on the neck. To date, only a few studies have investigated the repeatability of the use of the accelerometer in the assessment of cervical ROM. Therefore, the present longitudinal observational study analyzed the repeatability of acquired cervical movements on a sample of volunteer subjects who underwent accelerometer testing. A sample of 32 subjects was tested twice within 14 days to assess cervical ROM using a standardized protocol based on a review of existing literature. The results show that the examination is reliable for all the positions of the jaw, except for the parameters regarding the asymmetries of rotation and bending. In conclusion, the accelerometer can be considered a reliable tool for evaluating the active cervical ROM. However, further studies will be necessary to make better evaluations. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Digital Health: Intervention and Monitoring in Oral Health)

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13 pages, 5163 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Age Group Classification of Dental Radiography without Precise Age Information Using Convolutional Neural Networks

by Yu-Rin Kim, Jae-Hyeok Choi, Jihyeong Ko, Young-Jin Jung, Byeongjun Kim, Seoul-Hee Nam and Won-Du Chang

Healthcare 2023, 11(8), 1068; https://doi.org/10.3390/healthcare11081068 - 8 Apr 2023

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1470

Abstract

Automatic age estimation using panoramic dental radiographic images is an important procedure for forensics and personal oral healthcare. The accuracies of the age estimation have increased recently with the advances in deep neural networks (DNN), but DNN requires large sizes of the labeled dataset which is not always available. This study examined whether a deep neural network is able to estimate tooth ages when precise age information is not given. A deep neural network model was developed and applied to age estimation using an image augmentation technique. A total of 10,023 original images were classified according to age groups (in decades, from the 10s to the 70s). The proposed model was validated using a 10-fold cross-validation technique for precise evaluation, and the accuracies of the predicted tooth ages were calculated by varying the tolerance. The accuracies were 53.846% with a tolerance of ±5 years, 95.121% with ±15 years, and 99.581% with ±25 years, which means the probability for the estimation error to be larger than one age group is 0.419%. The results indicate that artificial intelligence has potential not only in the forensic aspect but also in the clinical aspect of oral care. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Digital Health: Intervention and Monitoring in Oral Health)

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21 pages, 7648 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Full-Digital Workflow for TMDs Management: A Case Series

by Simona Tecco, Alessandro Nota, Laura Pittari, Chiara Clerici, Francesco Mangano and Enrico Felice Gherlone

Healthcare 2023, 11(6), 790; https://doi.org/10.3390/healthcare11060790 - 8 Mar 2023

Cited by 3 | Viewed by 1689

Abstract

Temporomandibular joint disorders (TMDs) have always been the subject of studies due to the difficult management of symptoms and the complex stabilization of the so-called therapeutic position. In this effort, digital technologies open new opportunities for such planning, allowing the clinician to digitally assess the situation and verify the stability of the new position from a functional point of view. The present case series shows examples of preliminary full-digital planning of treatment in TMDs patients made with the preliminary evaluation of the kinematic activity of the mandible through a digital device (Tech in motion™, ModJaw, Villeurbanne, France). Three TMD clinical cases are analyzed with full-digital techniques and workflow. A personalized treatment for each case was digitally planned on the base of proper kinematic tracings recorded for each patient, and intraoral appliances were digitally customized through a full-digital or semi-digital workflow. The digitalization of mandibular kinematic gave us the possibility of making a more “aware” diagnosis, especially in a dynamic key, and then it allowed a faster realization and execution of the intraoral appliance through a digital workflow, memorizing the therapeutic position and early checking the device, before its realization, on the real kinematics of the patient. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Digital Health: Intervention and Monitoring in Oral Health)

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23 pages, 429 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Advancements in Dentistry with Artificial Intelligence: Current Clinical Applications and Future Perspectives

by Anum Fatima, Imran Shafi, Hammad Afzal, Isabel De La Torre Díez, Del Rio-Solá M. Lourdes, Jose Breñosa, Julio César Martínez Espinosa and Imran Ashraf

Healthcare 2022, 10(11), 2188; https://doi.org/10.3390/healthcare10112188 - 31 Oct 2022

Cited by 19 | Viewed by 4897

Abstract

Artificial intelligence has been widely used in the field of dentistry in recent years. The present study highlights current advances and limitations in integrating artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning in subfields of dentistry including periodontology, endodontics, orthodontics, restorative dentistry, and oral pathology. This article aims to provide a systematic review of current clinical applications of artificial intelligence within different fields of dentistry. The preferred reporting items for systematic reviews (PRISMA) statement was used as a formal guideline for data collection. Data was obtained from research studies for 2009–2022. The analysis included a total of 55 papers from Google Scholar, IEEE, PubMed, and Scopus databases. Results show that artificial intelligence has the potential to improve dental care, disease diagnosis and prognosis, treatment planning, and risk assessment. Finally, this study highlights the limitations of the analyzed studies and provides future directions to improve dental care. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Digital Health: Intervention and Monitoring in Oral Health)

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9 pages, 555 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Validation of a Simplified Digital Periodontal Health Screening Module for General Dental Practitioners

by Shahida Mohd-Said, Nur Adila Mohd-Norwir, Ahmad Najmi Ariffin, Huey Shiuan Teo, Nik Madihah Nik-Azis, Haslina Rani, Haslinda Ramli, Juzaily Husain, Tuti Ningseh Mohd-Dom and Afendi Hamat

Healthcare 2022, 10(10), 1916; https://doi.org/10.3390/healthcare10101916 - 30 Sep 2022

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 2249

Abstract

As a silent disease, individuals at risk of periodontitis are not easily identified until the disease has become severe. Early detection at the community level is essential, especially for general dental practitioners. The aim of this study was to design a comprehensive, user-friendly tool to screen patients’ periodontal health at community level and to evaluate users’ acceptance of its use. The periodontal health screening module was first developed by an expert panel of periodontists, public health specialists and general dentists. The developed module was tested for content acceptance on 156 graduating dental students from three public schools and later validated by 12 private general dental practitioners (GDPs) for reliability. Most of the students (64.1%) found the new module an easy assessment tool for periodontal health compared to the Basic Periodontal Examination (BPE). Most claimed that they understand the contents (80.8%) and accepted the designs (86.6%) and agreed (82.7%) that the new assessment module would allow them to screen patients anytime in the clinic. The interrater reliability as assessed between the GDPs and the investigators revealed acceptable agreement ranging from 62.5–100.0% (mean 89.6 ± 10.2%). The simplified digital periodontal health screening module showed promising acceptance for application in private general dental clinics. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Digital Health: Intervention and Monitoring in Oral Health)

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Review

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11 pages, 1094 KiB

Open AccessReview

Teledentistry as an Effective Tool for the Communication Improvement between Dentists and Patients: An Overview

by Md Refat Readul Islam, Rafiqul Islam, Sultana Ferdous, Chiharu Watanabe, Monica Yamauti, Mohammad Khursheed Alam and Hidehiko Sano

Healthcare 2022, 10(8), 1586; https://doi.org/10.3390/healthcare10081586 - 21 Aug 2022

Cited by 13 | Viewed by 6326

Abstract

Teledentistry is an online dental care service that allows patients and dentists to meet in real time, safely, without being at the same location. During the COVID-19 pandemic, real-time videoconferencing has gained popularity in the field of teledentistry, with numerous benefits for both patients and dentists. Online consultations can minimize costs, maximize time, and provide more convenient care options for both patients and dentists. When practicing teledentistry, a dentist must establish a good doctor–patient relationship. Dentists must ensure that the telecommunication solution that they choose meets their clinical requirements and complies with privacy laws. Dentists should provide adequate information to patients about the limitations, advantages, and disadvantages that may occur during online consultation. Dentists must follow guidelines and procedures regarding informed consent, patient details, personal communications, and consultancies’ privacy and confidentiality. The patient should be aware of the limitations of teledentistry, and dentists will provide the best advice possible in the absence of a face-to-face consultation. This article discusses how teledentistry could be an effective tool for dentists and patients. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Digital Health: Intervention and Monitoring in Oral Health)

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