Telemedicine is the remote delivery of health care services using information and communication technologies. The broad goal of telemedicine is to improve health of individuals and their communities in underserved areas (WHO, 1998). Teledentistry is a sub-group of telemedicine and is successfully used within the dental practice for teleconsultation, telediagnosis and delivery of oral care services (Khan, Omar, 2013). A systematic review concluded that teledentistry was a valuable tool for oral screening similar to face-to-face consultations (Alabdullah, Daniel, 2018). Several electronic devices were used to capture the intraoral soft and hard tissues such as smartphones, digital extraoral cameras, or intraoral cameras.
Smartphones equipped with imaging technology are readily accessible and very easy to use (Daniel, Kumar, 2014). In dental traumatology a clinical study showed that the remote diagnosis of dental traumas based on mobile phone pictures was similar to the diagnoses conducted in person (de Almeida Geraldino, Rezende, da-Silva, Almeida, 2017). A cross-sectional study showed, that smartphones with photo messaging can serve as an effective tool for the remote screening of potentially malignant oral disorders (Vinayagamoorthy, Acharya, Kumar, Pentapati, Acharya, 2019). Standardized mobile phone pictures were remotely assessed for dental caries without radiographs in children with mixed dentition (AlShaya, Assery, Pani, 2020). Sensitivity and specificity among several dentists were above 80%. A greater reliability was found at primary teeth as compared to permanent teeth. Similarly, a study showed that occlusal caries can be detected with acceptable diagnostic accuracy based on photographs taken by a smartphone camera compared to face-to-face screenings (Estai, et al., 2017). In orthodontics, the monitoring of linear tooth movements by means of a smartphone software showed an accurate assessment of the real tooth movements (Moylan, Carrico, Lindauer, Tufekci, 2019).
The use of small hand-held intraoral cameras was suggested as a feasible and potentially cost-effective option to a visual oral examination for caries screening in children (Kopycka-Kedzierawski, Billings, McConnochie, 2007). A clinical study with a total of 62 children reported that the agreement between digital and conventional clinical examinations was very good for various oral conditions (Pentapati, et al., 2017). Sensitivity and specificity were 98.1% and 66.7% for caries. Similar values were obtained for the detection of stains (99% sensitivity; 77.8% specificity), calculus (98%; 72.7%), and tooth wear (90.3%; 81%). Another study reported that sensitivity and specificity were 73% and 98% for the remote screening of dental caries in young adults by means of five standardized intraoral photographs (Morosini Ide, de Oliveira, Ferreira Fde, Fraiz, Torres-Pereira, 2014).
The diagnostic reliability in teledentistry may be limited to the image quality (Haron, et al., 2017), missing clinical data (de Almeida Geraldino, et al., 2017), and the two-dimensional representation by photographs (Pentapati, et al., 2017). Today, intraoral scanners (IOS) are mainly integrated in the fabrication workflow of chairside reconstructions (Muhlemann, Sandrini, Ioannidis, Jung, Hammerle, 2019). These devices can capture the intraoral conditions three-dimensionally and are augmented with close to true colors (Mangano, Gandolfi, Luongo, Logozzo, 2017).
To the best of our knowledge, no clinical study has evaluated the validity of using intraoral scans with approximate true colors for the screening for diseases affecting the periodontal tissues and dental hard tissues. Evidence that IOS are valid for the screening may change the organizational structure of dental practices leading to a higher adoption and a wider distribution of this technology. Therefore, the aim of this clinical validation study was to assess the agreement between remote screening based on intraoral approximate true color scans and traditional clinical examinations.