title: Testing the consistency of measurements of the distance between the cemento-enamel junction and the alveolar bone crest on bitewing radiographs.
abstract: The purpose of the research described in this paper is to test the consistency of measurements of the distance between the cemento-enamel junction and the alveolar bone crest (CJ-AC) on bitewing radiographs. The present paper shows how the consistency tests were organized and which statistical analyses were used. Since the actual characteristic (CJ-AC) could not alter, the variations of the results had to be due to one more of the 5 m-factors (man, material, machine, method and manipulation). To test the consistency of the measurements of CJ-AC, a pretest and an en route test were performed. Both the bitewing radiographs for the pretest and the en route test were sampled at random from the principal material. The principal material consisted of 856 sets of bitewing radiographs from persons born 1930-1949. The pretest of 40 sets of bitewing radiographs were read twice by 2 independent readers. The en route test consisted of 85 sets of bitewing radiographs which were read twice by 1 reader. Neither the results of the pretest nor the results of the en route test showed statistical or clinical differences of significance.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  the consistency of this method of measuring is satisfactory for the 2 readers.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Community Dentistry, University of Oslo, Norway.
authors.forename: A A
authors.initials: AA
authors.lastname: Schuller
authors.forename: D
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Holst
mesh_terms: D000368:Aged; D016301:Alveolar Bone Loss / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging*; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D006801:Humans; D008875:Middle Aged; D015588:Observer Variation; D016300:Radiography, Bitewing / Q000592:standards*; D012044:Regression Analysis; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D018709:Statistics, Nonparametric