Quantitative Measurement of Physical Value of Materials with a Dental Panoramic Radiograph

Abstract

In dental panoramic images the information on physical change of organs such as the alveolar bone and jaw bones is very important to diagnose several diseases. The tomosynthesis approach can focus on a specified imaging layer in the dental arch and the semi-quantitative analysis of imaging layer is expected to be realized. To evaluate the ability of quantitative analysis with the dental panoramic image, we used a head phantom and some metallic plates, and evaluated the relationship between the measured x-ray photons and the thickness of the material. In this experiment we used two dental panoramic apparatuses: one was a photon counting system with the tomosynthesis method and the other was an energy integration system without the tomosynthesis method. The experimental results showed that the images reconstructed with the tomosynthesis method with a photon counting detector had linearity between the thickness of the materials and the amount of detected x-ray counts.