Improvement of the detection method for carotid artery calcification in dental panoramic radiographs

This paper proposes improvement for the detection method for carotid artery calcification in dental panoramic radiographs. The existence of the carotid artery calcification as an index for arteriosclerosis attracts a great deal of attention. The detection method for carotid artery calcification has been proposed. However the detection rate is about 50% for real data and its improvement should be required. In this paper, the area of the processing window is narrowed to be 300 × 300 pixels. Then we focus on the shape and area of the target region and improve the detection and misdetection rates. From experimental results, the carotid artery calcification region can extract more precisely compared to the conventional method.