Updating Health Technology Assessment Report, CBCT Technology

Cone-Beam Computed Tomography (CBCT) is a medical imaging technology with various dental applications, and diagnosis of oral and maxillofacial lesions. The main purpose of the study is to update safety and efficacy of CBCT technology.

Since the time searching in the previous report was up to December 2010, electronic databases including Cochrane and Scopus have been searched from January 2011 to June 2014. In the first step, based on inclusion and exclusion criteria, title, abstract and full-text of articles were reviewed by two independent reviewers. In some cases, the full-text of articles was not available, so contact with author of article and the full-text was obtained. Also, non-English language articles were excluded from this study. At the next stage, all final papers were critically appraised and appropriate data were extracted. We have used the designed form in the previous report to extract data and information on the included articles. Due to the heterogeneity in studies, results were reported in descriptive and qualitative manners.

After removing duplicate articles, a total of 876 articles were included in this study. Finally, 23 studies were reached the final analysis stage. In terms of quality, 13 articles were of average quality and 10 articles were of good quality. Most of the studies have been related to Iran (5 cases), Brazil (4 cases), Germany (3 cases), Britain, USA and, Netherlands (each country has 2 studies) and, Turkey, China, India and, Switzerland (each country has 2 studies). The included studies have been conducted in 2011 (8 cases), 2012 (6 cases), 2013 (5 cases) and, 2014 (4 cases), respectively. 1806 samples were reviewed in all included studies. Most of important reported cases include sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, positive and negative predictive value, and under area curve. 86.3% of the studies reported sensitivity and specificity (19 studies), accuracy (8 studies), area under the curve (8 studies). Positive and negative predictive values were 36.3% and 27.2%, respectively.

CBCT imaging is highly sensitive to the diagnosis of various types of lesions in oral. However, due to the limit number of clinical trials and the lack of evidence, further studies are needed to make stronger decisions.