INFLUENCE OF PORTABLE AND ROUTINE X RAY UNITS ON INTRAORAL IMAGE QUALITY

Since the study of images quality taken with dental portable radiographic devices is not carried out, the aim of this study was to compare the quality of radiographs taken with Diox 602 portable device and Min Ray fixed device with each other.
This experimental study was performed on 10 patients with request of more than 10 intraoral radiographs were almost symmetrically from both sides of the jaws. Half of radiographs per patient were performed using a portable device and the other half using fixed device by Kodak intraoral films. Then they were developed and fixed by automatic processing in the same condition. After coding, radiographs were examined by three oral and maxillofacial radiologists by four defined criteria in terms of density, contrast, resolution and noise. To each of the qualitative criteria was given a rating of acceptable or unacceptable. The weighted kappa coefficient was 90% for inter-observer reproducibility. The results were analyzed using Chi-square test.
From a total of 109 radiographs, 58 radiographs were taken by portable device (Diox 602) and 51 radiographs by fixed device (Min Ray). Most of the radiographs were evaluated at an acceptable level in terms of ranking in each of the qualitative parameters and no significant difference was noted between two groups in any parameter (P Quality of the images taken by the portable X-ray machine (Diox 602) showed no significant difference compared with fixed X-ray machine (Min Ray).