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...
For a century, diagnosing decay in a small child's mouth has meant one thing: a clinician, a mirror, a light, and a cooperative patient sitting still long enough to be examined. A 2025 Australian study quietly proposed an alternative. Capture a colour three-dimensional scan of...
Two radiographs of the same tooth, taken months apart, can look identical to a trained eye while a real lesion quietly advances between them. Digital subtraction radiography is the technique that makes that invisible change visible: align the two images perfectly, subtract one from the...
The most revealing decision a clinician makes about a radiograph is often whether to take it at all. The first ADA and AAOMR patient-selection recommendations in more than a decade - and the first to address cone-beam CT - reframe imaging not as a schedule...
A lateral cephalogram is one of the most standardized images in all of dentistry - a skull rendered in exact geometry so that the same points can be found on it year after year. For a century, finding those points was patient handwork with a...
A wall-mounted X-ray head is a fixed instrument, aligned by a stable arm and switched from behind a wall. A handheld unit puts the same tube in one gloved hand and asks the clinician to be both aimer and tripod. The device has become common...
For a single crown, an intraoral scanner is enough. For a full arch of implants, the errors of scanning add up across the span until the bridge no longer fits the bone it was built for. Photogrammetry answers with a different discipline entirely: it does...
A dental radiograph is framed for your teeth, but the exposure does not stop at the enamel. In the same grey field sit the sinuses, the jaw, the airway, the soft tissues of the neck - and now and then, something no one was looking...