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....
Almost every clinical photograph of a smile is a single, held instant - the posed, static frame we ask the patient to freeze into. But a real smile is not a pose; it is a movement, a brief and asymmetric event that begins at repose...
Sharpness, exposure, and color get the attention, but the first decision in every clinical photograph is made before any of them: where to put the frame. Composition - what the picture includes, what it excludes, how it is centered and leveled - is the quiet...
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...