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Updated: Oct 2, 2025
Accuracy in Dental Medicine, A New Way to Measure Trueness and Precision
Published on: April 29, 2014
ACCURACY OF CLINICAL AND RADIOGRAPHIC MEASUREMENTS OF PERIODONTAL INFRABONY DEFECTS OF DIAGNOSTIC TEST ACCURACY (DTA)
D Clark-Perry1, G A Van der Weijden2, W E R Berkhout3
1Department of Dentistry, Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada.
Background:
The aim of this study was to determine the accuracy of clinical and radiographic measurements of infrabony periodontal defects.
Methods:
The MEDLINE-Pubmed and Cochrane-CENTRAL electronic databases were searched from initiation to May 2020. The inclusion criteria were clinical trials, human subjects with at least one infrabony defect, measurements of clinical attachment level (CAL), radiographic bone level (rBL), and intraoperative bone level (iBL) used as the reference standard.
Results:
In total, 11 studies including 17 comparisons were included in this meta-analysis. All 17 comparisons showed that the values of the CAL and rBL measurements underestimated the iBL values. For CAL, the analysis showed a significant difference of means of -1.22 (P < .00001; 95%CI: [-1.49; -0.95]) and for rBL -1.10 (P < .00001; 95%CI: [-1.34; -0.85]). No significant DiffM were observed between the CAL and rBL measurements (DiffM -0.05; P = .76; 95%CI: [-0.39; 0.28]).
Conclusion:
The results of this systematic review and meta-analysis show that both clinical and radiographic measurements substantially underestimate the bone level when compared to intraoperative level measurements. However, there was no significant difference in the results between the clinical attachment level measurements and the radiographic observation.
