A Machine Learning Approach to Evaluating the Relationship Between Dental Extraction and Craniofacial Growth in Adolescents

There may be multiple reasons for tooth extraction, such as deep cavities, an infection that has destroyed an important portion of the tooth or the bone that surrounds it, or for orthodontic reasons, such as the lack of space for all the teeth in the mouth. In the case of orthodontics, however, there is a relationship between tooth extraction and the craniofacial morphological pattern. The purpose of this study is to establish whether such a relationship exists in adolescents and to evaluate it and to serve as a tool to support medical decision making. Machine Learning techniques can now be applied to datasets to discover relationships between different variables. Thus, this study involves the application of a series of Machine Learning techniques to a dataset containing information on orthodontic tooth extraction in adolescents. It has been discovered that by following simple rules it is possible to identify the need of treatment in 98.7% of the cases, while the remaining can be regarded as "limited cases", in which an expert's opinion is necessary.