Skip to main content

REVIEW article

Front. Dent. Med
Sec. Pediatric Dentistry
Volume 6 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fdmed.2025.1495025
This article is part of the Research Topic Updates in Pediatric Dentistry View all 14 articles

Radiographic Localization of supernumerary teeth: A narrative review

Provisionally accepted
Sreekanth Kumar Mallineni Sreekanth Kumar Mallineni 1*Robert Prashanth Anthonappa Robert Prashanth Anthonappa 2Jayakumar Jayaraman Jayakumar Jayaraman 3Nigel M King Nigel M King 2
  • 1 Pediatric Dentist, Dr Sulaiman Al Habib Hospital, Ar Rayyan, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
  • 2 School of Dentistry, The University of Western Australia, Western Australia, Perth, Australia
  • 3 Department of pediatric Dentistry, Virginia Commonwealth University School of Dentistry, Richmond, VA, United States

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Objectives: To conduct a narrative review of the published literature on the localization techniques to identify the best technique for the localization of supernumerary teeth.Methods: An extensive search of literature published in English between January 1966 and May 2024 was conducted using the "Medline via PubMed" and "Cochrane database" databases. The keywords included in the search were "localization" "radiographs", and "impacted teeth", or "unerupted teeth", or "supernumerary teeth" or "supernumerary tooth". The citation lists from the included articles were examined to identify additional reports and a hand search was also conducted. Kappa statistics were used for intra-examiner reliability. Results: The initial search yielded 4864 citations, subsequently examined and supplemented by a hand search to find additional studies. Commonly used techniques for the localization of supernumerary teeth are the horizontal tube shift technique, vertical tube shift technique, vertex occlusal technique, and cone-beam computerized tomography. Conclusion: The most commonly used localization techniques for supernumerary teeth are horizontal tube shift, vertex occlusal, vertical tube shift, and cone-beam computerized tomography. Conventional radiographs only provide twodimensional views of 3-dimensional structures. Three-dimensional imaging alone can provideaccurate data on impacted supernumerary teeth but, the need for this film has to be justified because of the higher radiation exposure.

    Keywords: localization, Radiographs, impacted teeth, Supernumerary Teeth, CBCT

    Received: 11 Sep 2024; Accepted: 03 Jan 2025.

    Copyright: © 2025 Mallineni, Anthonappa, Jayaraman and King. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Sreekanth Kumar Mallineni, Pediatric Dentist, Dr Sulaiman Al Habib Hospital, Ar Rayyan, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.