Evaluation of Observer Agreement in the Detection of Inter Proximal Caries in Digital Bitewing Radiography with Two Types of LCD Monitor

Advances in Radiographic detection method lead to the development of several digital radiography systems and displaytechnology of them. The purpose of this study was the evaluation of observer agreement in the detection of interproximal caries in the digital bitewing radiography with two type of LCD Monitor. In this exprimental study, 27 Bitewing digital radiography were evaluated by four observers on 2 monitors of Samsung sync mastery203B and EizoflexscanMX190. The depth of the caries on radiograms was classified into five grades. After 14 days, observers evaluated the same image to evaluate the repeatability. Kendall,s correlation coefficient and Chi-square test were used for statistical analysis. According to Kendall,s correlation, intera-observer agreement were 0.69 & 0.7 and inter observer agreement were 0.56 & 0.62 for the conditional & medical monitor respectively. According to the depth of the caries, there was a significant difference between two monitors only in detection of grade 0 and grade 1 caries (P<0.01). There was no significant difference in intra & inter observer agreement between two types of the monitor. Therefore, conditional monitors with the minimum of resolution are enough to defect caries. No extra information is taken from the medical monitors