Exploring the useful exposure range limits of three intraoral image receptors for various tube potential, tube current and exposure time settings

Abstract

Objectives: To determine the useful exposure range limits of three intraoral image receptors of different technology when exposed to different X-ray beam spectra, dose and dose rate levels. Study Design: A dental X-ray unit offering a wide range of tube potential, tube current and exposure time settings was used to expose a dental quality control phantom. The receptors that were used to capture the radiographic images of the phantom were: the Kodak Insight, the Kodak RVG-6000 and the Duerr Vistascan system. The images that were produced over a wide range of exposure factor settings were evaluated in terms of diagnostic quality by three experienced radiologists. Results: The number of images with acceptable diagnostic quality was in total 1257; 310 with Insight, 331 with RVG 6000 and 616 with Vistascan. At 60 kV, diagnosable images were produced with doses ranging from 0.44 -1.56 mGy for the Insight film 0.44 -2.82 mGy for the RVG 6000 and 0.22 -4.93 mGy for the Vistascan system. At 70 kV, the respective ranges were 0.39 -1.28 mGy for the Insight film 0.31 -2.55 mGy for the RVG6000 and 0.30 -3.46 mGy for the Vistascan system. Conclusions: The Vistascan exhibited the widest useful exposure range and required the least exposure to produce a diagnosable image at almost all tube potential settings. The RVG 6000 exhibited a slightly wider useful exposure range than the Insight film, with almost the same dose requirements especially in higher Kv settings.

Correlation between Quantitative and Qualitative Analysis on Image Quality of Digital Dental X-ray Images

“…Class=3 shows that original and SCLAHE have the same score (19). AHE is the highest (21) and CLAHE has the lowest score (16).…”

“…For class=1, CLAHE (24) is able to overcome SCLAHE (20). The ranking then goes to the original images (16), and AHE is the lowest (12). For class=2, the scores show that SCLAHE and AHE are the highest (3) then the original (2) and CLAHE (2).…”

“…Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) is an accepted quantitative analysis in evaluating the performance of enhancement techniques [1][2][3]. The enhancement techniques are an accepted image processing task in medical imaging [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16]. Medical images need image processing techniques to enhance the visual appearance of the images [1][3] [4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12].…”

“…Currently, intraoral radiography film is the only common way to diagnose periapical pathology in routine clinical practice [14] [16]. These lesions can be detected in the radiographic images based on the degree or gradation of "blackness" of the radiograph images [15].…”

Subjective-Objective Matching Evaluation Approach for Enhanced Dental Images

“…However, diagnosis is difficult due to image quality problem and the anatomical complexity of the lesion. The regulation of low dosage used has resulted in radiograph images suffering from low contrast [1][2][3]. In addition, X-ray machine translate original 3-dimensional anatomy of the skull to 2-dimensional results in anatomy overlapping effect on the radiograph images [4].…”