Using cone beam CT with image processing in detecting the bone mineral density of jaw

In the dental implant operation, the quality of bone mineral density (BMD) is required since the implant will graft through cortical bone into trabecular bone. If a patient has low BMD, the implant operation may fail and lead to complication; for example, the implant may penetrate through the maxillary sinus or inferior dental canal such that the patient will be facial nerve disorders for the injured inferior dental nerve. Thus, the dentist should have a BMD examination before the implant operation. In order to explore the bone mineral density, the patient used to take extra efforts to take a BMD examination by Dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA). In this paper, we exploit the cone beam computed tomography (CBCT) images for getting the BMD by exploring the relationship between trabecular bone and the gray levels of these images through the gray level of trabecula of the CBCT images. The simple linear regression is used to explore the correlation, threshold of osteoporosis and predict the t score. The experiment results show that the CBCT image can be used to explore the BMD of the implant area and the threshold of osteoporosis can be determined to detect whether the patient is low BMD.