The purpose of this study was to review the clinical applications of CBCT in deferent dental disciplines.
Methods:
A Pub Med search was conducted from 1 January 1998 to 15 July 2010. “Cone-beam computerized tomography in dentistry” was used as a keyword to widespread the search of CBCT imaging to different dental disciplines clinical application.The search revealed 540 papers, which were screened in detail. 406 papers were excluded because they were not relevant to the subject. The systemic review consisted of 134 clinically relevant papers.
Result:
36 papers (26.6%) were related to applications in oral and maxillofacial surgery, 32 papers (24.4%) were related to Endodontic clinical applications, 22 papers (16.3%) were related to Implant dentistry, 16 papers (11.8%) were related to orthodontic clinical applications, 14 papers (10.3%) dealt with the clinical applications in General Dentistry, 8 papers (5.9%) were about the Tempromandibular joint, 5 papers (3.7%) were related to Periodontics applications, and 1 paper (0.7%) was about forensic.
Conclusion:
CBCT has most of its applications in the oral maxillofacial surgery, endodontic, implant dentistry, and orthodontics. CBCT examinations must not be carried out unless it's necessary and demonstrate that the benefits outweigh the risks, images acquired from CBCT must undergo a thorough clinical evaluation ‘radiological report' of the entire image dataset to maximize the benefits from clinical data of these images.