Digital radiography in dental x-ray l Oral radiology MCQs for dental students
IMPORTANT POINTS TO REMEMBER
- • Digital radiography may be defined as
a system for acquisition, processing and display of radiographic images using
modern data processing technology.
- • Components of a digital radiographic system: A digital
radiographic system consists of solid-state detector and storage phosphor plate.
- • Solid-state detectors: Solid-state
detectors are made of semiconductors such as silicon or germanium, which are doped
by other elements.
- • Pixel: A solid-state detector
contains a high number of mostly square-shaped small (side length:
approximately 20 mm) measurement devices made of the semiconductor material. These
small units are called ‘pixels’, an acronym derived from ‘picture elements’.
- • CCD sensors: Here, the electric charge
resulting from incident photons is collected over columns and rows.
- • CMOSs: In CMOS technology,
transistors are integrated into each pixel and the charge acquired by the pixel
is directly amplified and transferred.
- • Storage phosphors: Storage
phosphors are also semiconductors; they are completely different from a
chemical point of view. For instance, yttrium oxide doped with europium is a
material with the typical properties of a storage phosphor.
- • Digital image: A digital image is
composed of pixels of intraoral radiographic sensors which are currently approximately
19 mm wide. Consequently, a digital image is not at all continuous
but ‘discrete’ in nature.
- • Pixel binning: It should be noted,
however, that most of the manufacturers combine several physical pixels to one
software pixel, a process referred to as ‘pixel binning’.
- • Image processing: Computer may
manipulate the image in one or another way by simply calculating a new image from
the original one.
- • Convenient
advantage of digital image processing is the ability to suppress or partly
remove noise.
- • Digital subtraction radiography: In fact, the
simple method of subtracting two radiographs is referred to as ‘digital subtraction
radiography’.
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