Abstract
Dental implants have become an accepted form of permanent teeth replacement. The fixture can be implanted in the mandible and/or the maxilla. Diagnostic imaging can play an important role in evaluating such dental implant patients. Especially, computed tomography and computer-reformatted cross-sectional imaging are suitable for the measurement and diagnosis of the mandible and maxilla. However, the absorbed dose from computed tomography was higher than that from conventional tomography, including panoramic radiography.
Magnetic resonance imaging can produce high quality tomographic images with greater soft tissue contrast without ionizing radiation, anesthesia, and injection. The aim of this study was to evaluate the usefulness of magnetic resonance imaging for diagnosis of the preoperative condition of dental implant patients.
Five volunteers were examined by 0.5 T MR scanner, using 3 kinds of sequences-proton density and T1- and T2-weighted images. The detection of the mandibular canal and the maxillary alveolar bone were mainly investigated.
In T1-weighted images, mandibular canal and alveolar bone were detected in all five volunteers.
It was concluded that magnetic resonance imaging was very useful for evaluating the preoperative condition in dental implant patients without using radiation.
