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....
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...
A panoramic radiograph is ordered to survey the teeth, the jaws, the developing third molars - and along the lower border of the mandible it records something no one asked it to. The inferior cortex of the jaw, that bright ribbon of dense bone at...
A conventional cone-beam scan measures one thing: how strongly each speck of tissue absorbs an X-ray beam. But absorption alone is ambiguous - a sliver of dense enamel and a whisper of metal can cast the very same grey. Spectral, dual-energy CBCT reads two different...
For a century the radiograph told us almost everything about a tooth - and quietly kept one secret. Pressing a three-dimensional root system flat onto a single plane, it overlapped canals, hid the ones tucked directly behind others, and turned a fused, ribbon-like root into...
The intraoral scanner records the mouth as it looks - a flawless colour surface, and nothing beneath it. The radiograph records the mouth as light passes through it - the roots, the bone, the hidden lesion - and almost nothing of the surface. Each is...
Every dental radiograph carries a blur that no detector, no software, and no amount of retaking can fully remove - because the X-ray source is not a point of light but a small glowing area on a metal target, and every point on that area...