Application of image processing techniques to aid in the detection of vertical root fractures in digital periapical radiography.

Objectives: To present an image processing framework to improve the detection of vertical root fractures (VRFs) in digital periapical radiography.

Materials And Methods: Thirty endodontically treated human teeth (15 of them fractured with a metal post inserted into them, and 15 for the control) were enclosed in a dry mandible and radiographed individually. The proposed framework was applied to the raw data, as a preprocessing step, and was composed of four stages: geometric adjustment and negative, denoising, adaptive contrast enhancement, and gamma correction.