Application of subjective objective image enhancement (SOIE) framework on dental images

The advancement in medical imaging modality has made it possible to produce many types of digital medical images. However, limited effort has been done so far to utilize these valuable resources towards understanding the abnormalities' characteristic that the images might have. This is due to time consuming and expensive medical experts' interpretation processes. A case study on dental images has been conducted. Pairing the subjective and objective evaluation towards interpreting dental image might speed up the process. Therefore, this research introduced a new subjective-objective based image enhancement (SOIE) framework to identify objective measurements based on dentists' subjective evaluation on abnormalities in jaw area. The framework consists of three phases; image processing experimental design, subjective evaluation and objective evaluation. The study is limited to three abnormalities only; periapical radiolucency (PR), widen periodontal ligament space (PDLs) and loss of lamina dura (LD). The final output of this framework is the abnormality matrix that consists of subjective and objective measurement of the abnormalities.