Cone-beam computed tomography accuracy in pulp chamber size evaluation: An ex vivo study

Cone-Beam Computed Tomography for the Evaluation of Dental Pulp Chamber Volume: Implications for Clinics and Teaching

The dental pulp chamber volume is a fundamental measurement in the field of endodontics, but also in forensic sciences, teaching and training, or tissue engineering. This study evaluates the precision of cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT) in comparison with computed micro-tomography (micro-CT) in evaluating the pulp chamber volume of the upper central incisors ex vivo. The intra-operator and inter-operator errors were evaluated, and the results for the two techniques were compared with those of a T-test for paired samples. The intra-operator and inter-operator errors were >0.05, indicating adequate reproducibility in each operator and no significant differences between their measurements. On the other hand, no significant differences between the two measurement techniques were found. The present results demonstrate that CBCT is a precise, feasible, and reproducible technique for the evaluation of the dental pulp chamber volume ex vivo. The results provided with this method are useful for different medical domains but also for the teaching and training of undergraduate and postgraduate students. Furthermore, the findings of this study carry significant clinical implications, as the accurate assessment of the pulp chamber volume is critical in the diagnosis and treatment of various endodontic conditions. The ability of CBCT to provide reliable 3D dental anatomy measurements can enhance the planning of endodontic treatments by allowing for a better understanding of the internal tooth morphology. Additionally, the precision and reproducibility of CBCT in assessing the pulp chamber volume can contribute to improved clinical outcomes and reduced complications during endodontic procedures. These findings further support the increasingly vital role of CBCT in modern clinical practice and underscore its value as an indispensable tool in the field of dentistry.

Image Segmentation Technology Based on Attention Mechanism and ENet

With the development of today's society, medical technology is becoming more and more important in people's daily diagnosis and treatment and the number of computed tomography (CT) images and MRI images is also increasing. It is difficult to meet today's needs for segmentation and recognition of medical images by manpower alone. Therefore, the use of computer technology for automatic segmentation has received extensive attention from researchers. We design a tooth CT image segmentation method combining attention mechanism and ENet. First, dilated convolution is used with the spatial information path, with a small downsampling factor to preserve the resolution of the image. Second, an attention mechanism is added to the segmentation network based on CT image features to improve the accuracy of segmentation. Then, the designed feature fusion module obtains the segmentation result of the tooth CT image. It was verified on tooth CT image dataset published by West China Hospital, and the average intersection ratio and accuracy were used as the metric. The results show that, on the dataset of West China Hospital, Mean Intersection over Union (MIOU) and accuracy are 83.47% and 95.28%, respectively, which are 3.3% and 8.09% higher than the traditional model. Compared with the multiple watershed algorithm, the Chan-Vese segmentation algorithm, and the graph cut segmentation algorithm, our algorithm increases the calculation time by 56.52%, 91.52%, and 62.96%, respectively. It can be seen that our algorithm has obvious advantages in MIOU, accuracy, and calculation time.

The Equine Dental Pulp: Histomorphometric Analysis of the Equine Dental Pulp in Incisors and Cheek Teeth

To maintain a healthy and functional status, equine hypsodont teeth have to produce lifelong large amounts of subocclusal dentin to prevent occlusal pulp exposure, which is caused by occlusal wear. To examine the cyto- and histological components that guarantee the lifelong high productivity of equine pulp, a limited number of ten incisors and ten cheek teeth from seven adult horses (aged 5 to 24 years) and five foals were sampled for preliminary histomorphometric and histomorphological evaluations. Independently of age, the equine dental pulp featured constant layers of predentin and odontoblastic cells, as well as soft connective tissue, composed of a cellular fibrous matrix, in which blood vessels and nerve fibers were embedded. As a result of the progressive deposition of newly formed dentin, the layer of dentin became thicker with age, and the size of the pulp chamber decreased. In contrast to the brachydont teeth, the morphological characteristics of the odontoblastic layer and the width of the predentin layer did not change with age. Therefore, it is assumed that the equine pulp tissue retained their juvenile status, which explains its unchanged ability to produce high amounts of subocclusal dentin. These preliminary, but clinically significant, findings are worthy of further investigation in order to identify strategies for equine-specific endodontic therapies.