Age and sex estimation based on pulp cavity volume using cone beam computed tomography: development and validation of formulas in a Brazilian sample

Abstract

Objectives: To develop and validate formulas for age and sex estimation based on the pulp cavity volume of teeth using cone beam CT. Methods: The sample was composed of 116 cone beam CT scans from Brazilian individuals of both sexes, ranging in age from 13 to 70 years. A total of 232 teeth (upper central incisors and canines) were evaluated. Two calibrated examiners determined pulp cavity volumes using the ITK-SNAP software. Pearson’s correlation test was used to assess the correlation between chronological age and pulp volume. Linear and logistic regression models were developed for age and sex estimation, respectively, and were validated in another sample of 72 teeth. Results: Pearson’s correlation coefficients between age and pulp volume were negative and significant (p < 0.0001) for both teeth (r = −0.8782 for central incisors and r = −0.8738 for canines). The age estimation formulas showed good determination coefficients (adjusted R² = 0.7614 to 0.8367). For sex estimation, when the age was known, the coefficients were also good (adjusted R² = 0.649 to 0.812). However, when the age was unknown, the coefficients of the sex estimation formulas were low (adjusted R² = 0.047 to 0.393). Validation showed high accuracy of age estimation in individuals older than 35 years, as well as high accuracy of sex estimation when the age was known. Conclusions: Our formulas provided excellent results and can be applied to the Brazilian population. The best results were observed for age estimation in females and for sex estimation when the age was known.

Dental age estimation based on pulp chamber/crown volume ratio measured on CBCT images in a Spanish population

“…Indeed, 36.6% of the age variability was explained by the pulp chamber/crown volume ratio for upper incisors, and the differences between chronological and estimated age was <5 years for 31.3% of these teeth. Similar results have been published by other authors, indicating that the pulp tooth volume ratio of incisors offers a reliable DAE method [3,8,13,16,[26][27][28]. However, results for canines did not prove to be a reliable approach to age estimation in this Spanish population, unlike findings in Malaysian [8], Tunisian [23], Iranian [28], Indian [12], and Pakistani [32] populations.…”

“…The progressive decrease of pulp volume over time has been used to estimate dental age in adult individuals [3,8,[12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27], although the apposition of secondary dentine is not homogeneous on all walls of the pulp cavity [21]. Difficulties have been reported in detecting minute structural demarcations at the root apex (pulp tissue and calcified tooth structures) and undertaking this manually for this purpose would be time-consuming [8].…”

“…Imaging techniques have been used for this method, but the accuracy of estimations on two-dimensional radiographs [11] is limited by magnification and distortion [12,13]. The increasing use of three-dimensional images in dental practice has led to research exploring the association between age and pulp/tooth volume ratio in samples from Belgium [3,14], Japan [15][16][17][18][19], India [12,20], Italy [21], China [22], Tunisia [23], and more recently, Malaysia [8,24], Brazil [25,26], Turkey [13,27] and Iran [28,29]. The results have indicated that age can be estimated with reasonable accuracy using three-dimensional images.…”

Age estimation based on 3D post-mortem computed tomography images of mandible and femur using convolutional neural networks

“…Experimental setup. Regarding the validation method for age prediction in forensic anthropology, Andrea et al [37] discussed common issues that were encountered when using incorrect procedures. Several reported studies did not validate over unseen data, which could lead to an overfitting problem.…”

The accuracy of age estimation from pulp chamber/crown volume ratio of canines obtained by cone beam computed tomography images: an Egyptian study

“…Similarly, another study in the Malaysian population also revealed higher errors of age prediction from the pulp volume of maxillary canines in the age group of 46-65 years old (Asif et al 2019). In the Brazilian population, Andrade et al (2019) demonstrated high accuracy of age estimation from the upper incisors and canines in individuals older than 35 years. This finding could be attributed to the consistent dentine deposition which occurs at regular intervals in the middle age; however, this deposition is rapid both in younger ages until 30 years old and again in the older age groups (Kazmi et al 2019).…”