Enhancement of tomosynthetic images in dental radiology.

In conventional projection radiography, anatomical structures superimposed on details of interest increase the difficulty of visual interpretation. Part of this problem can be resolved by tomographic reconstruction of specific "tissue" slices. Computer-aided tomosynthesis is one method which can reduce the superposition problem, but the reconstruction can benefit from further enhancement. In this investigation, we studied two such enhancement schemes: high-pass spatial-frequency filtration and iterative deconvolution. The performance of each technique was judged qualitatively in terms of the depiction of specific details of diagnostic interest, and quantitatively in terms of the degree of success afforded by each in rendering adjacent tissue slices independent. Both techniques demonstrated improved performance over the status quo.