Enhancement of trabecular bone on dental panoramic radiographs using multiscale line operator

Mandibular bone on dental panoramic radiographs provides information that can be used to diagnose several diseases. One of the most complex structures inside is trabecular bone. Manual analysis on the trabecular bone structure, however, is very difficult. This paper discussed a method to clarify and sharpen the structure of the trabecular bone on dental panoramic radiographs which will give a better medical information and easier to be analyzed. We employed multi-scale line operators (MSLO) to detect the linear structure on trabecular bone in dental panoramic radiographs. Our experiment achieved the highest average of 16109 white pixels from 15 dental panoramic radiographs.