Quality Assurance in Digital Volume Tomography

Abstract

Digital Volume Tomography is a method of rising value in dentistry as well as in oral and maxillofacial surgery. The different systems commercially available offer a variety of characteristics due to their different construction and the different reconstruction algorithms in use. Especially the missing possibilities to export raw data linearly and the fact that there is no common output scale like the Hounsfield scale in computed tomography make it difficult to evaluate images of test phantoms in a unified way. We present measurements of resolution, homogeneity, contrast to noise ratio and modulation transfer function from datasets built from a test phantom by different commercial systems. The results are connected to dose measurements and the comparability of results from different systems is discussed as well as the possibility of statements about differences in their efficiency.