Evaluation of the mandibular third molar region using 2D vs 3D acquisitions with dental-dedicated MRI.

Abstract

There is increasing interest in MRI for diagnostic purposes in dentistry, resulting in development of a novel dental-dedicated MRI (ddMRI) system. This study compared 2D and 3D acquisitions of the mandibular third molar (MTM) region using ddMRI. Twenty MTMs of 20 patients were randomly selected from participants in clinical trials scanned using ddMRI (MAGNETOM Free. Max, 0.55 T, Siemens Healthineers AG, Forchheim, Germany). The 2D and 3D acquisitions were obtained for each patient. Three observers evaluated both 2D and 3D image datasets of each patient for overall quality and visibility of relevant anatomic structures. Results focused on descriptive statistics, inter- and intraobserver reproducibility and inferential statistics for comparison of 2D and 3D images within each observer. Most anatomic structures were recorded as visible in every dataset for both 2D and 3D acquisitions. The 2D images showed superior quality and lingual nerve visibility across all observers compared to 3D volumes. Inter- and intraobserver reproducibility ranged vastly, from -0.167 to 1 and -0.667 to 1. Most anatomic features in the MTM region are adequately depicted with both 2D and 3D acquisitions. The 2D acquisition quality was sufficient for diagnostic purposes of the MTM region, while diagnostic capability of the 3D volumes remains uncertain.