Evaluation of soft tissues simulant materials in cone beam computed tomography.

Objectives: To evaluate different materials in simulating soft tissues and to analyze the influence of these materials on the mean (MPIV) and standard deviation of pixel intensity values comparing them to a gold-standard in CBCT images.

Methods: Images of three piglet heads with their soft tissues intact (gold-standard) and different simulant materials were acquired: ice, modelling wax, and ballistic gelatin, with the same thickness of the original soft tissues. The pixel intensities were measured in dental, bone and soft tissues regions, in the mandible and maxilla, for all the groups.