Dental informatics to characterize patients with dentofacial deformities

PLoS One. 2013 Aug 5;8(8):e67862. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0067862. Print 2013.

Abstract

Relevant statistical modeling and analysis of dental data can improve diagnostic and treatment procedures. The purpose of this study is to demonstrate the use of various data mining algorithms to characterize patients with dentofacial deformities. A total of 72 patients with skeletal malocclusions who had completed orthodontic and orthognathic surgical treatments were examined. Each patient was characterized by 22 measurements related to dentofacial deformities. Clustering analysis and visualization grouped the patients into three different patterns of dentofacial deformities. A feature selection approach based on a false discovery rate was used to identify a subset of 22 measurements important in categorizing these three clusters. Finally, classification was performed to evaluate the quality of the measurements selected by the feature selection approach. The results showed that feature selection improved classification accuracy while simultaneously determining which measurements were relevant.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Cluster Analysis
  • Dental Informatics*
  • Dentofacial Deformities / classification*
  • Dentofacial Deformities / diagnosis*
  • Humans

Grants and funding

This work was supported by Brain Korea 21 (Network Enterprise). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.