Pre-operative Radiograph of Deep Carious Lesions as a Predictive Tool for Pulpal Exposure

"Three hundred and sixty pre-operative radiographs of deep carious lesions and a contrasted version of the same set have been screened and annotated by 4 evaluators. Annotations were placed at the dentino-enamel junction, at the floor of the carious lesions, and on pulp chamber wall. From these annotations, the ratios residual dentin thickness/ total dentin thickness were derived. First, inter-evaluator agreement and concordance were assessed. A logistic regression that accounted for measurement error was applied to precisely estimate the capacity of the ratio to predict exposure (reported as odds-ratio)."