Willems II. Non-gender-specific dental maturity scores

Demirjian's dental maturity scoring system has been adapted for a Belgian Caucasian population for males and females. The purpose of this study was to adapt Demirjian's dental maturity scoring system from a Belgian Caucasian population to provide non-gender-specific scores. We selected 2116 orthopantomograms of 1029 boys and 1087 girls aged 3-16 years. A weighted ANOVA was performed in order to adapt the scoring system for this Belgian population. A second test sample of 273 orthopantomograms of individuals with immature dentitions aged 3-16 years was used to evaluate the accuracy of the original method, gender-specific scores and non-gender-specific scores of the adapted method. Mean/median difference between dental age and real age was calculated as well as other measures of accuracy. The adapted scoring system resulted in new age scores expressed in years and in a higher accuracy compared to the original method in Belgian Caucasians.