View article

Periodontal disease (PD) is a chronic inflammatory disease that affects the gum tissue and bone supporting the teeth. Although tooth‐site level PD progression is believed to be spatio‐temporally referenced, the whole‐mouth average periodontal pocket depth (PPD) has been commonly used as an indicator of the current/active status of PD. This leads to imminent loss of information, and imprecise parameter estimates. Despite availability of statistical methods that accommodates spatiotemporal information for responses collected at the tooth‐site level, the enormity of longitudinal databases derived from oral health practice‐based settings render them unscalable for application. To mitigate this, we introduce a Bayesian spatiotemporal model to detect problematic/diseased tooth‐sites dynamically inside the mouth for any subject obtained from large databases. This is achieved via a spatial continuous sparsity …