Aim: The purpose of this study was to evaluate a new calibration method through photographs for assessment of the intra and inter examiner reliability for the plaque index of Quigley-Hein as modified by Turesky. Method: After Ethic Committee approval, 9 children were recruited randomly from a public school in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Two trained examiners evaluated simultaneously these subjects for plaque scoring, in a classroom. The teeth were stained again and colour photographs were taken of all teeth surfaces using Dental Eye IIÔ (Yashica), mouth mirrors and lip retractors. The photographs were evaluated for selection and identification of the best visible teeth surfaces, therefore the sample consisted to 344 teeth surfaces. One week after the clinical examination, both examiners scored the teeth surfaces from the photographs according to the index used. The intra and inter-examiner agreement were measured by weighted Kappa (k) for teeth surface scores and intra-class correlation coefficient for subject mean score. Results: There was no evidence of great differences between the examiners also when scoring clinically (k = 0.96) or by photographs (k = 0.88). The inter examiner evaluation showed similar results for examiner 1 (k = 0.72) and 2 (k = 0.71). The intra-class correlation between examiners when scoring clinically was 0.99, and 0.98 when photographs were used. Both examiners had a intra-class correlation of 0.88 between the clinical and photograph examination. Conclusion: The method seems to be an effective technique to evaluate the reliability of the plaque index, improving the reproducibility of epidemiological studies.

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