Analysis of Dental Material Components Using Cosine Similarity

Abstract

Elemental analysis of a 12% gold-silver-palladium alloy and bovine teeth was conducted by X-ray microanalysis, and the results were transformed into multidimensional vectors. Standard values for a metal material and an inorganic material were also developed from the manufacturers’ declared values and vectorized in the same manner. A cosine similarity search between the vectors of the analysis data and those of the standard values was performed to experimentally ascertain whether it is possible to estimate the origins of the two types of samples, namely the 12% gold-silver-palladium alloy and bovine teeth. The results showed that the cosine similarity to the expected standard values was >99% for the metal sample and exceeded 90% for the bovine teeth, sufficiently demonstrating the potential for accurate origin identification. This method, which expresses the outcome as a single probabilistic percentage output, was found to be highly objective and easy to evaluate in the context of information sharing.