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Radiopacity of dental materials using a digital X-ray system.
Steven Gu1, Brian J Rasimick, Allan S Deutsch
1Essential Dental Laboratories, 89 Leuning Street, South Hackensack, NJ 07606, USA. sgu@edsdental.com
Summary
A new digital radiography method simplifies radiopacity assessment for dental materials. This technique offers a consistent and accurate approach, improving upon traditional film-based radiography protocols for material evaluation.
Area of Science:
- Materials Science
- Dental Materials
- Radiography
Background:
- Radiopacity is crucial for intra-oral dental materials.
- Existing ISO and ANSI/ADA radiopacity protocols rely on film-based radiography.
- Researchers often deviate from established protocols.
Purpose of the Study:
- Adapt existing radiopacity determination protocols for digital radiography.
- Utilize a simplified stepwedge for accuracy.
- Investigate the impact of target distance and exposure time on measurements.
Main Methods:
- Prepared 1mm thick dental material samples within washers.
- Digitally radiographed samples with an aluminum alloy 1100 stepwedge at 70 kVp.
- Varied target distance and exposure time, correlating grey scale values to aluminum thickness for radiopacity calculation.
Main Results:
- Established highly linear correlations between stepwedge absorbance and thickness.
- Demonstrated that varying exposure time had no significant effect on radiopacity at 30 cm target distance.
- Found that target distance did not significantly affect radiopacity with proper exposure.
Conclusions:
- Presented a simplified and consistent digital method for dental material radiopacity determination.
- The digital method allows for accurate correlation deduction from fewer data points.
- This approach offers an improvement over traditional film-based methods.