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Updated: Jan 3, 2026

Oral Health Assessment by Lay Personnel for Older Adults
Published on: February 2, 2020
A yellowness index for use in dentistry
Chelsea Sullivan1, Qianqian Pan1, Stephen Westland1
1School of Design, University of Leeds, Leeds, LS2 9JT, United Kingdom.
Objectives:
To develop an equation that predicts the perceptual yellowness of teeth.
Methods:
A large set of new psychophysical yellowness data were generated from an experiment where 500 participants each ranked a set of 58 shade guide samples. Two existing equations (WIO and b*) and one new equation (YIO) were evaluated by comparing their values for the 58 shade guide tabs with the psychophysical data. Coefficient of determination (r2), '% wrong decisions', and STRESS were used as measures of performance. The YIO equation was optimized using these data to maximize the r2 value. A validation set of psychophysical data was prepared in an experiment where 40 participants each ranked 5 sets of 9 samples that were viewed on an emissive display. The candidate equations were evaluated using these data and the r2, %WD, and STRESS metrics.
Results:
All three metrics YIO, WIO and b* were strongly correlated with perceptual yellowness. YIO and WIO both showed stronger correlation than b*.
Conclusions:
A new yellowness equation YIO has been developed to correlate with tooth yellowness. It is suggested that tooth yellowness and whiteness are highly related concepts.
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