Low dose means a noisy scan. A new class of deep-learning reconstruction rebuilds a clean, diagnostic cone-beam image from a fraction of the radiation — and asks us to read a picture the algorithm partly inferred....
A periapical radiograph flattens a three-dimensional mouth onto a single plane. The tube-shift rule — Same Lingual, Opposite Buccal — is the century-old craft of recovering the depth that projection quietly erased....
A malignancy can hide in mucosa that still looks pink and healthy to the eye. Tissue autofluorescence answers the question a clinical portrait cannot: bathe the mucosa in blue light, and healthy tissue glows back a soft green while trouble goes dark. Here is the...
For a century the dental image has lived behind glass—on film, on a lightbox, on a monitor. Augmented reality proposes something stranger and older: to lift the scan off the screen and hang it, weightless and registered, inside the patient's own head....
A black contrastor does more than tidy the frame. It removes the mouth from the picture so the tooth can finally be seen for what it is: a translucent object of light....
A radiograph is nearly blind to a hairline fracture that runs with the light rather than across the beam. Transillumination answers the question a flat X-ray cannot: shine light through the tooth, and the crack reveals itself. Here is the craft of capturing it....
The temporomandibular joint is the one structure in the mouth that refuses to sit still for its portrait. It is part bone and part soft cartilage, it works as a matched pair, and it is defined by movement - three properties that no single imaging...
A cone-beam scanner does not, strictly speaking, take a picture. It measures a dense three-dimensional block of numbers - a volume - and every flat image a clinician actually looks at is a decision made afterward about how to collapse that block onto a screen....
In late July 2026, Carestream Dental announced a strategic alliance with the ADA Forsyth Institute, sealed by the donation of a state-of-the-art cone-beam computed tomography system to the institute's clinical arm. It is easy to read that as a press release. It is more interesting...
A broken bone or a cracked tooth a quarter-million miles from the nearest hospital is a problem of imaging before it is a problem of medicine. To answer it, NASA's Glenn Research Center has been testing portable, handheld X-ray systems built to work in a...