بررسی تاثیر فیلترهای پردازش تصویر دیجیتال بر روی تشخیص لندمارک های رادیوگرافی لترال سفالومتری

Background and objectives: accurate identification of landmarks of lateral cephalometric radiographic is important for analysis. the objective of this study was to investigate the effects of digital image processing filters on detection of lateral cephalometric landmarks.subjects and methods: lateral cephalometric radiographs were acquired from 30 patients. the unprocessed images and those processed using shadow, sharpen, negative and 3d emboss filters were assessed by two observers and scored for clarity of points a, b, n, orbitale, pronasal, subnasal, pogonion’ and menton’. the results were statistically analyzed using friedman and wilcoxon tests.results: for detection of points n، orbitale and pronasal، 3d emboss filter had the lowest rating and the other methods were not significantly different. for detection of points a، subnasal، pogonion’ and menton’, 3d emboss and negative filters had the lowest rating and these two filters were not significantly different and the other methods were not significantly different. for point b all methods were not significantly different.conclusions: the results of this study clearly showed that processing of lateral cephalometric radiographs with different filters does not necessarily lead to improvement of the image but a wrong selection algorithms and filters may reduce the diagnostic quality of the images.