title: Dental examiners consistency in applying the ICDAS criteria for a caries prevention community trial.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  To examine dental examiners' one-year consistency in utilizing the International Caries Detection and Assessment System (ICDAS) criteria after baseline training and calibration.
  
  
  METHODS
  A total of three examiners received baseline training/calibration by a "gold standard" examiner, and one year later re-calibration was conducted. For the baseline training/calibration, subjects aged 8-16 years, and for the re-calibration subjects aged five to six years were recruited for the study. The ICDAS criteria were used to classify visual caries lesion severity (0-6 scale), lesion activity (active/inactive), and presence of filling material (0-9 scale) of all available tooth surfaces of permanent and primary teeth. The examination used a clinical light, mirror and air syringe. Kappa (weighted: Wkappa, unweighted: Kappa) statistics were used to determine inter-and intra-examiner reliability at baseline and re-calibration.
  
  
  RESULTS
  For lesion severity and filling criteria, the baseline calibration on 35 subjects indicated an inter-rater Wkappa ranging from 0.69-0.92 and intra-rater Wkappa ranging from 0.81-0.92. Re-calibration on 22 subjects indicated an inter-rater Wkappa of 0.77-0.98 and intra-rater Wkappa ranged from 0.93-1.00. The Wkappa for filling was consistently in the excellent range, while lesion severity was in the good to excellent range. Activity kappa was in the poor to good range. All examiners improved with time.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The baseline training/calibration in ICDAS was crucial to maintain the stability of the examiners reliability over a one year period. The ICDAS can be an effective assessment tool for community-based clinical trials.
authors.affiliation: School of Dental Medicine, Case Western Reserve University, Department of Community Dentistry, Cleveland, Ohio 44106-4905, USA. suchitra.nelson@case.edu
authors.forename: S
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Nelson
authors.forename: H
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Eggertsson
authors.forename: B
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Powell
authors.forename: J
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Mandelaris
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Ntragatakis
authors.forename: T
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Richardson
authors.forename: G
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Ferretti
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D002986:Clinical Trials as Topic; D003149:Community Dentistry; D004245:DMF Index; D003731:Dental Caries / Q000145:classification / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000517:prevention & control; D003732:Dental Caries Activity Tests; D003793:Dental Restoration, Permanent; D003815:Dentists / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D005240:Feasibility Studies; D006801:Humans; D015588:Observer Variation; D015203:Reproducibility of Results