RT Journal Article
T1 A systematic overview of dental methods for age assessment in living individuals: from traditional to artificial intelligence-based approaches
A1 Vila Blanco, Nicolás
A1 Varas Quintana, Paulina
A1 Tomás, Inmaculada
A1 Carreira Nouche, María José
K1 Dental radiology
K1 Chronological age estimation
K1 Forensic dentistry
K1 Deep learning
AB Dental radiographies have been used for many decades for estimating the chronological age, with a view to forensic identification, migration flow control, or assessment of dental development, among others. This study aims to analyse the current application of chronological age estimation methods from dental X-ray images in the last 6 years, involving a search for works in the Scopus and PubMed databases. Exclusion criteria were applied to discard off-topic studies and experiments which are not compliant with a minimum quality standard. The studies were grouped according to the applied methodology, the estimation target, and the age cohort used to evaluate the estimation performance. A set of performance metrics was used to ensure good comparability between the different proposed methodologies. A total of 613 unique studies were retrieved, of which 286 were selected according to the inclusion criteria. Notable tendencies to overestimation and underestimation were observed in some manual approaches for numeric age estimation, being especially notable in the case of Demirjian (overestimation) and Cameriere (underestimation). On the other hand, the automatic approaches based on deep learning techniques are scarcer, with only 17 studies published in this regard, but they showed a more balanced behaviour, with no tendency to overestimation or underestimation. From the analysis of the results, it can be concluded that traditional methods have been evaluated in a wide variety of population samples, ensuring good applicability in different ethnicities. On the other hand, fully automated methods were a turning point in terms of performance, cost, and adaptability to new populations
PB Springer
YR 2023
FD 2023
LK http://hdl.handle.net/10347/30843
UL http://hdl.handle.net/10347/30843
LA eng
NO Vila-Blanco, N., Varas-Quintana, P., Tomás, I. et al. A systematic overview of dental methods for age assessment in living individuals: from traditional to artificial intelligence-based approaches. Int J Legal Med 137, 1117–1146 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00414-023-02960-z
NO Open Access funding provided thanks to the CRUE-CSIC agreement with Springer Nature. This work has received financial support from Consellería de Cultura, Educación e Ordenación Universitaria (accreditation 2019–2022 ED431G-2019/04 and Group with Growth Potential ED431B 2020–2022 GPC2020/27) and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), which acknowledges the CiTIUS-Research Center in Intelligent Technologies of the University of Santiago de Compostela as a Research Center of the Galician University System
DS Minerva
RD 24 abr 2026