Dental age estimation: development and testing of a reference data set for Qatari children, adolescents, and young adults aged between 5 and 25 years

The purpose of this study is to establish and test a reference data set of dental development of Qatari subjects aged between 5 and 25 years. Radiographs of individuals aged between 5 and 25 years were re-used to establish a reference data set (RDS). A scheme comprising 8 tooth development stages (TDS) was used to assess all the teeth on the left side of the maxilla and mandible. The accuracy of dental age estimation (DAE) was tested with a separate sample of radiographs – the validation sample (VS) comprised 50 females and 50 males of known chronological age (CA). Dental panoramic tomographs (DPT) of 1,597 Qataris were assessed. The summary data for the individual TDS comprising the number (n-tds), mean (\(\overline{\mathrm{x} }\)-tds), standard deviation (sd-tds), 0th%-ile (the minimum), 25th%-ile, 50th%-ile (the median), 75th%-ile, and 100th%-ile (the maximum) were used to estimate the age of the VS subjects using the simple average method (SAM). There is a significant difference in dental age of 4.8 months in the female group when compared to the CA. The difference in the male group is 4.5 months. This shows similar differences to assessments of other ancestral or ethnic groups.