Nature and clinical significance of incidental findings in maxillofacial cone-beam computed tomography: a systematic review

Dental and Maxillofacial Cone Beam CT—High Number of Incidental Findings and Their Impact on Follow-Up and Therapy Management

“…Caglayan and Tozoglu estimated the overall rate of incidental findings as 92.8% in a group of 207 consecutive patients [20]. Warhekar et al described only 7.2% incidental findings in a cohort of 795 consecutive patients [30], which stands in contrast to the much higher rate of incidental findings in our study as well as most other studies [16,[20][21][22]26,29]. A possible explanation is that Warhekar et al analyzed written reports of CBCT examinations instead of performing a systematic image analysis by themselves.…”

“…Radiologists should deal and familiarize with the specific analysis of CBCT to minimize the possible consequences for the patients of missing incidental findings. This emphasizes again the importance of close collaborations between medical and dental specialties as Khalifa et al recently pointed out [29].…”

“…Edwards et al reported an incidence of 1.97 incidental finding per examination [25]. A pathological finding is often considered as "incidental" if it is not in context with the primary indication [10][11][12]28,29]. Moreover, incidental findings with reference to the primary indication might be regarded as incidental, especially if they are asymptomatic.…”

Maxillofacial Radiology 197

“…The most reported form of physiological brain calcifications is in the pineal gland and is thought to be an age-related change. 2 Pathological calcifications are less common than the physiological variants and are because of more serious diseases such as infectious diseases, endocrine disorders, metastatic lesions, and primary intracranial tumours, to name a few. 3 Above are images of two patients that presented to our facility for reasons unrelated to the calcifications.…”