Abstract
It seems in general that the videotaping is one of the most economical and convenient media to record moving pictures, and that the recorded images are of sufficient quality to evaluate the behavior of children during dental treatment. Videotaping has a week point however: i. e. since the data format of videotapes is sequential, it takes a certain period of time to search the necessary scenes. In this study, we designed a digitized observation system of moving pictures to search the necessary scene without waiting time for evaluation of the behavior of children.
Video movies of two-year-old patient, which were taken during dental treatment in our clinic 5times, were used for the system. The movies were digitized using a Motion-Jpeg encordable card and captured by a computer as AVI files. The total volume of the digitized movie files(79 m 3 s)amounted to 2.11 GB. The quality of the movies was 16-bit-color and 640×480 pixels. The frequency of capture was 15/sec. We therefore calculated that a digitized 10 minute movie file had 9000frames. The starting frame of each treatment scene(the patient sitting on the dental chair, injection, restoration by turbine, etc. ) in the file was marked and the serial number of frames from the top of the file was taken in the database. After that, a retrieval system was made to play the digitized movies from arbitral frames in the database.
The retrieval system was then tested. The subjects were ten pediatric dentists(5 of them used the retrieval system and the others used video tapes). Both groups described the score of behavior evaluation cased on the rating scale. The results of the test were as follows.
1. The scores of behavior evaluation were not very different in both groups.
2. In the retrieval system group, not only was the time of the operation equipment short, but also both the time of observation and description was shorter than that of the group using the videotapes.
