Aims and Objectives: To evaluate the styloid process (SP) and its anatomical variations on digital panoramic radiographs from the database and also to synthesize the current evidence of literature on SP and anatomical variations along with the systematic review of the relevant studies after making the necessary exclusions. Materials and Methods: A total of 500 panoramic radiographs from the database were examined and evaluated for the length of SP using OmniVue software and for the calcification patterns which were categorized into three types as described by Langlais. The obtained values were analyzed using t -test and Chi-square tests with a significance level of 0.005 and SPSS version 20.0 software. Results and Conclusion: The mean length of the SP in females was found to be 3.7 cm on the right side and 3.8 cm on the left side. The mean length of the SP in males was found to be 3.4 cm on the right side and 3.3 cm on the left side with significant difference between the genders with the P values of 0.0002 and 0.0001, respectively. The length of the SP was significantly longer in females than in males. Type I was the most common SP and was more prevalent in females. The results of the present study along with the wide range of reported incidence of anatomical variations in the form of elongation from the literature extracted through the systematic review suggests the need to reevaluate the range of the normal length of the SP.

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Interactive sculpting is the process by which a designer can impose free-form shape changes on the object being designed. It has potential applications in the fields like computer aided geometric design arid rapid prototyping. Our approach to interactive sculpting is through the intermediate step of interactive virtual nlachining (IVM). IVM is a subset of interactive sculpting in that the degrees offreedom available to the sculptor are reduced. The goal of our work is to demonstrate the feasibility of interactive virtual machining on a shared memo? multiprocessor workstation. Our prototype IVM system uses a voxel based approach. I t provides common machining tools to the user and uses Minkowski operations to implement those tools.Parallel implementation of the virtual machining tools has shown that sculpting with 2S63 voxel array is possible with frame rate of around 20 frameshec. We present the parallel algorithms for virtual machining tools and the results of implementation on a shared memory multiprocessor environment.