Tilting a mandible containing two dental implants can significantly improve the quality and reduce the dose of cone-beam CT (CBCT) images, according to a study in the European Journal of Radiology (October 28, 2010).
Working with the mandible of a 5-month-old pig, researchers from the University of Basel took multiple cone-beam CT images, varying the accelerating voltage, beam current, starting rotation angle of the mandible in the source-detector plane, and the tilt angles of the jaw with respect to the source-detector plane.
The researchers found that tilting the porcine mandible by about 14° improves the image quality by almost a factor of two.
"The comparison of 14° jaw tilting with respect to the currently recommended arrangement in plane with the teeth demonstrates that the applied exposure time and the related dose can be reduced by a factor of four without decreasing the image quality," they concluded.
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