IOS-based teledentistry shows promise for paediatrics

Dental Tribune International

Fri. 26. September 2025

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GIESSEN, Germany: To expand access to paediatric care beyond the traditional clinical setting, the application of asynchronous teledentistry is gaining interest. A recent study from Germany compared findings from intra-oral scans (IOSs) with standard visual dental examinations in children to determine whether paediatricians could use IOSs to provide diagnoses and treatment recommendations reliably compared with dentists. They found that paediatricians can effectively assess oral health and provide reliable treatment recommendations, highlighting both the reliability of trained paediatricians in dental assessment and the potential for closer interdisciplinary collaboration in paediatric healthcare.

The study included 70 children aged 4–17 years, representing both primary and permanent dentition. All children underwent visual dental examinations as part of routine dental check-ups and then underwent IOSs of the oral cavity. A dentist and a paediatrician each carried out independent teledental evaluations of the IOS data, judging the same diagnostic criteria, including overall dental health, presence of caries, presence and type of restorations, molar incisor hypomineralisation, urgency of dental intervention and treatment recommendations.

The researchers found high agreement between IOS-based findings and visual examinations for many criteria. Overall dental status, caries detection and the presence of restorations showed almost perfect concordance. By contrast, some differences emerged in more detailed assessments. Restoration type, for instance, showed greater discrepancies between dentist and paediatrician, and the paediatrician demonstrated lower accuracy. The paediatrician was less accurate in certain diagnostic areas and missed findings that the dentist detected. Nevertheless, agreement with visual examination regarding the urgency of intervention was high for both the dentist and paediatrician, and treatment recommendations showed substantial to almost perfect agreement, although slightly lower for the paediatrician.

The study indicates that, with appropriate training, paediatricians could use IOSs in teledentistry to reliably assess children’s oral health and make informed decisions on treatment urgency, although certain diagnostic details, such as restoration type, remain better suited to dentists. Furthermore, the findings highlight the potential to expand access to care in settings where dentists are not immediately available. In such cases, paediatricians could perform screenings or preliminary assessments using IOSs and refer patients to dentists only when necessary—a model particularly valuable for remote areas, hospitals and interdisciplinary care.

The study, titled “Comparison of dental findings between dentists and pediatricians using intraoral scan-based teledentistry in children”, was published online on 2 September 2025 in Scientific Reports.

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