Impact of Digital Radiology

Digital radiography

Introduction

Radiography is an essential diagnostic procedure in dentistry, before, during and after the completion of therapeutic activities. The diagnosis of many dental anomalies would be impossible without radiographs, because their location in the mineralized tissues (bone and teeth) or hidden under the surface of the cortical plate. The use of radiographs is indispensable during the treatment phase, e.g., during root canal treatment to monitor the progress of the root preparation, or to know the orientation of wisdom molars to be extracted. The effect of dental treatment of bony structures, e.g., the treatment of periodontal defects or the success of apicoectomy, can be established by radiographic examination only.

Computer based systems

Since many years, film is used to acquire radiographic images. Since a few years, however, electronic sensors are available that to produce radiographic images. Advantages of these sensors are the immediate availability of the images, the lower radiation dose, the possibility of image enhancement, image reconstruction and computer aided image analysis, transmission of images by telephone, and storage of large numbers of images in image-databases. The sensors are part of an electronic image acquisition system consisting of the sensor, a frame grabber in the computer and the software required to control the sensor and the do some basic manipulation with the images captured by the sensor. The software of the x-ray sensor systems currently available on the market have only limited capabilities with regard to image analysis and image enhancement; only a few of the features mentioned before can be found in these software packages. This is in spite of the research literature in this field, which describes several important procedures to enhance and improve the diagnostic procedure.

Dedicated software for image processing

The Emago software is intended to provide the dental practitioner (in general practice, in dental clinics and in dental institutions) with the most recent scientific results that have been proven to be clinically reliable and useful. It is therefore a comprehensive and advanced environment for the dental practitioner to acquire, store, retrieve, enhance and analyze her or his digital x-rays.

More information regarding the Emago software can be found here: www.emago.info