Influence of CBCT enhancement filters on diagnosis of vertical root fractures: a simulation study in endodontically treated teeth with and without intracanal posts

Abstract

Objectives: To evaluate the influence of CBCT enhancement filters on the diagnosis of vertical root fractures (VRFs) in teeth with and without metal posts. Methods: The crowns of 40 uniradicular human teeth were removed and all roots were prepared. 20 teeth were randomly selected, and VRFs were induced using a universal testing machine. The i-CAT (Imaging Sciences International, Hatfield, PA) CBCT was used to scan teeth with and without intracanal metal posts using the following parameters: 0.2 voxel size, 8 3 8-cm scan size and acquisition time of 26.9 s. Images were evaluated by three observers with and without the use of the following filters: S9, smooth, smooth 3 3 3, sharpen, sharpenmild and sharpen 3 3 3. Results: Intra-and interobserver agreement ranged from poor to moderate. Images with and without CBCT filters did not show significant differences regarding the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve, as well as sensitivity (p . 0.05). As for accuracy, the sharpen-mild filter was superior to the sharpen (p 5 0.03), but these filters did not differ from all others. For specificity, S9, smooth and original images were superior to sharpen (p , 0.01). Results for teeth without posts differed from those for teeth with metal posts in all cases (p , 0.05). Conclusions: The use of enhancement filters in CBCT images has no influence on the diagnosis of VRFs in teeth with metal posts, and their use is not justified.

Influence of Cone‐Beam Computed Tomography filters on diagnosis of simulated endodontic complications

“…() and Ferreira et al . () reported the influence of CBCT filters on vertical root fracture detection, which was not a condition simulated in the present study, and concluded that there was no significant difference when applying some XoranCat ® filters. Although this endodontic complication was not considered in the present study, their results are in agreement with the present results, except for the fractured file group.…”

“…, Ferreira et al . ). However, there is a lack of information on CBCT filter performance in detecting several endodontic complications, justifying the importance of the present study.…”

“…, Ferreira et al . ), highlighting the need of conducting further investigations into other clinical situations. Therefore, the aim of this study was to evaluate the influence of several CBCT filters in the diagnosis of simulated endodontic complications.…”

“…Despite the known efficacy of CBCT in Endodontic diagnosis (Patel & Horner 2009, Scarfe et al 2009, Durack & Patel 2012, Ball et al 2013, the complexity of certain cases has led to the need to investigate tools that could potentially facilitate the diagnostic process (Vaz et al 2012, Nascimento et al 2014, Ferreira et al 2015. Filters are CBCT software tools designed to enhance or soften the images.…”

Influence of exposure parameters on the detection of simulated root fractures in the presence of various intracanal materials

“…, Ferreira et al . ). In the present study, the diagnosis of VRF was compromised by the presence of metallic posts and gutta‐percha, in accordance with previous studies (Costa et al .…”