Storage, querying and visualisation of clinical dental records

Dental examinations of school aged children have been carried out by Health Authorities in the UK for many years. As well as collecting epidemiological data during the surveys, the state of each tooth surface has been recorded. The entire dental record of each child is stored as a single ASCII string of characters within a file. Although a programme exists to organise the numerical data into a more understandable visible matrix, it is still difficult to visualise the information as a whole. Moreover, detailed analysis of many dental records is not possible. This paper considers a method of displaying the data in the more usual standard clinical pictorial form, and of storing them in a more efficient way to allow further data analysis to be performed.