by Leif Kullman
How about keeping up with all the advancements and new trends in Oral Radiology?
This month I will tell you about a new service that ODIS has started. A possibility to send us an e-mail and to attach digital radiographs. What a digital radiograph is was explained earlier (in my September report last year), but here is a short repetition.
Traditionally radiology relies on films and a radiograph is made of grey scales spanning from black to white, known as continuous tone image. To be able to transform any image into a digital image it has to be minutely examined into individual pieces of information called picture elements, that is pixels. The pixels contain information regarding the light intensity or brightness and also about their location or x, y coordinates. Forming a digital image requires a computer to quantify these two parameters: brightness and position.
Most dentists must sometime have felt themselves isolated as dentist, with no one available to share daily practice problems and to assist with for example establishing a difficult diagnosis? Today by means of IT and computers it is easy to get in contact with colleagues and with different advisors to get some help in diagnosing different kinds of pathology in our dental images.
To be able to use ODIS new service the following prerequisites must be available:
You must have access to a computer and an e-mail address. Besides that you must have a digital radiographic equipment for intraoral or panoramic radiographs. If you not have a digital unit but instead a conventional, there is another way to digitize the image called the indirect way. With a video camera or a scanner, information can be captured from a radiograph and later on displayed and transferred from your computer to ours.
The computer must be quite up-to-date and equipped with some kind of image software enabling editing greyscales pictures. The program that has been bought together with the digital radiographic unit will usually be enough. Some of the most common file formats as TIF or GIF should be possible for this program to handle or produce. The size of the images should be less than 300 kB each.
The following course of action can then be followed:
Send an e-mail to remiss-radiologi@odont.se or directly to radiologi@odont.se with relevant information, including
sex and age of the patient (and also some identification records
as number or initials if you send more patients)
question at issue
examination date for the radiographs
anamnestic history (including general diseases and relevant
drug intake)
clinical findings
your own name, address and invoice address
Also declare if you are in a need of an urgent answer (less than 48 hrs). Usually you should have your answer within 2-3 days. Attach the image to this message in any of the formats mentioned above by means of your mail program.
This service is free of charge for all VIP members at ODIS. If you are not a VIP member the price is 600 SEK for urgent cases and 400 for the usual cases.
Next month my friend John Kristoffersen, who is a dentist but today is working with planning our digital future in a company in Sweden will tell us a little about the way he thinks it will be.
Leif Kullman
