Purpose: In this study the temporal texture differentiation associated with the bone formation properties, around loaded oral implants after Platelet Rich Plasma (PRP) employment, was investigated in Panoramic Radiographs.
Materials and methods: Thirty eligible patients are randomly assigned to two groups. The test group received PRP application around new implants, while in the control group no PRP treatment was made. The bone-to-implant contact region was analyzed in a clinical sample of 60 Digitized Panoramic Radiographs, 30 corresponding to immediate implant loading (Class-I) and 30 after an 8 month follow-up period (Class-II). This region was sampled by 1146 circular Regions-of-Interest (ROIs), resulting from a specifically designed segmentation scheme based on Markov-Random-Fields (MRF). From each ROI, 41 textural features were extracted, then reduced to a subset of 4 features due to redundancy and employed as input to Receiver-Operating-Characteristic (ROC) analysis, to assess the textural differentiation between two classes.
Results: The selected subset, achieved Area-Under-Curve (AUC) values ranging from 0.77-0.81 in the PRP group, indicating the significant temporal textural differentiation has been made. In the control group, the AUC values ranged from 0.56-0.68 demonstrating lesser osseo integration activity.
Conclusion: This study provides evidences that PRP application may favor bone formation around loaded dental implants that could modify the dental treatment planning.
Keywords: Markov Random Fields; Platelet Rich Plasma; dental implants; implant segmentation; medical image texture analysis; radiography.