Literature review Digital Subtraction Radiography in Dentistry

Introduction Radiography is a main diagnostic tool for detecting dental and maxillofacial lesions 2, . Radiologic images have two dimension of three dimensional reality, hence, the images of different anatomical structures are superimposed on each other and, thus, make it difficult to detect the lesions 2, 4, . Radiographic examination is still left much to be desired as a diagnostic tool: First of all, because of frequent disagreement among evaluators on its interpretation and discrepancies of the same evaluator's interpretation at different times. Secondly, dental and maxillofacial lesions often progress slowly, so they can not be easily evaluated with sequentially obtained radiographs, and thirdly, structural 'noise' produces visual confusion and limits the detection of small lesions.The strength of Digital Subtraction Radiography (DSR) is because it cancels out the complex anatomic background, against which the subtle changes occurs. As a result, the conspicuousness of the changes is greatly increased (figure 1). Subtraction images are well-suited for acquiring quantitative information such as linear, area, and density measurements. Methods used to make such measurements range from visual