Clinical pantomography of the jaws.

Abstract

Pantomography is a procedure which has been developed for the purpose of obtaining laminagrams of curved surfaces. This method employs a fixed source of radiation, while object and film are rotated on holders having equal radii and moving at equal speed through a peripheral frictional arrangement. The rather narrow roentgen beam reproduces on the film the layer of interest, which has the same linear velocity and direction of movement as the film itself. Structures outside this layer of equal linear velocity are blurred in the usual tomographic manner. The reproduced section, however, appears in essentially better detail than in conventional tomography. For concentric pantomography the object is placed concentrically on the holder. This technic is best suited to structures of considerable length, e.g., the entire jaw, though it may entail some lack of detailed definition. In eccentric pantomography, the object is placed eccentrically on the holder. Thus, only a portion will be reproduced, with some gain in...