Extraction of cervical vertebrae from panoramic X-ray images

The purpose of this study is to remove the cervical vertebrae from a dental panoramic x-ray image with a tomosynthesis method. The elimination of the cervical vertebrae is based on the concept of the tomosynthesis method. We first measured the shift-amount that was required to reconstruct a panoramic x-ray image of the dental arch with a calibration phantom. Then, we made the shift-amount that was required to reconstruct the cervical vertebrae. With these data, we reconstructed the focused image of the dental arch and cervical vertebrae. These two images were processed with the blurring functions defined at each focusing geometry of the above images, and the true image of the dental arch without the shadow of the cervical vertebrae was obtained. Our proposed method was evaluated with clinically measured data. The results of the experiments showed that our proposed method was remarkably effective in removing the shadow of the cervical vertebrae.