Effects of Apexification and Regenerative Endodontic Therapy on the Periapical Bone in Immature Teeth: a Retrospective Study

The fractal dimension analysis of each radiograph was performed using the box-counting method proposed by White and Rudolph [1] (Figure 1). All periapical radiographs in high resolution Jpeg format to be included in the study was converted to tagged image file formats (TIFF). Each ROI at 18 x 19 pixels and 2 mm from the radiographic apex was selected, cropped and amplified. "Gaussian Blur" was used to eliminate the brightness changes due to soft tissues and variable bone thicknesses. The resulting image was then be subtracted from the original image. Bone marrow spaces and trabeculae were separated from each other by adding 128 gray values to each pixel location. The fractal dimension was calculated after the binary, etching, dilate, inversion and skeletonization operations were done.

This study was carried out on the radiographic records of patients who applied to Istanbul University Faculty of Dentistry, Department of Pedodontics, who had at least one immature incisor treated with MTA apexification and RET method, and who had at least one-year follow-up radiographs.

Cases in which all endodontic treatments were performed by the same pedodontist (GK) were examined.