Recording Natural Head Position Using Cone Beam Computerized Tomography

The purpose of this study was to develop a technique to record the natural head position (NHP) of a subject using the scout images of cone beam computerized tomography (CBCT) scans. The first step was to align a hanging mirror with the vertical (XY) plane of the CBCT field-of-view (FOV) volume. Then, two scout CBCT images, at frontal and at sagittal planes, were taken when the subject exhibited a NHP. A normal CBCT scan on the subject was then taken separately. These scout images were used to correct the orientation of the normal CBCT scan. A phantom head was used for validation and performance analysis of the proposed method. It was found that the orientation detection error was within 0.88°. This enables easy and economic NHP recording for CBCT without additional hardware.