Machine learning assisted Cameriere method for dental age estimation

BACKGROUND: Recently, the dental age estimation method developed by Cameriere has been widely recognized and accepted. Although machine learning (ML) methods can improve the accuracy of dental age estimation, no machine learning research exists on the use of the Cameriere dental age estimation method, making this research innovative and meaningful. AIM: The purpose of this research is to use 7 lower left permanent teeth and three models [random forest (RF), support vector machine (SVM), and linear regression (LR)] based on the Cameriere method to predict children's dental age, and compare with the Cameriere age estimation. SUBJECTS AND METHODS: This was a retrospective study that collected and analyzed orthopantomograms of 748 children (356 females and 392 males) aged 5–13 years. Data were randomly divided into training and test datasets in an 80–20% proportion for the ML algorithms. The procedure, starting with randomly creating new training and test datasets, was repeated 20 times. 7 permanent developing teeth on the left mandible (except wisdom teeth) were recorded using the Cameriere method. Then, the traditional Cameriere formula and three models (RF, SVM, and LR) were used to estimate the dental age. The age prediction accuracy was measured by five indicators: the coefficient of determination (R(2)), mean error (ME), root mean square error (RMSE), mean square error (MSE), and mean absolute error (MAE). RESULTS: The research showed that the ML models have better accuracy than the traditional Cameriere formula. The ME, MAE, MSE, and RMSE values of the SVM model (0.004, 0.489, 0.392, and 0.625, respectively) and the RF model (− 0.004, 0.495, 0.389, and 0.623, respectively) were lower with the highest accuracy. In contrast, the ME, MAE, MSE and RMSE of the European Cameriere formula were 0.592, 0.846, 0.755, and 0.869, respectively, and those of the Chinese Cameriere formula were 0.748, 0.812, 0.890 and 0.943, respectively. CONCLUSIONS: Compared to the Cameriere formula, ML methods based on the Cameriere’s maturation stages were more accurate in estimating dental age. These results support the use of ML algorithms instead of the traditional Cameriere formula. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12903-021-01996-0.