A Prototype Equipment for Revelation and Digitization of Periapical Radiographic Plates

This work proposes a composite electronic equipment aimed at the revelation and digitization of periapical radiographic plates to automate their development process, improve their quality, and enable specialists to have a digital medical history of each patient. Normally, the image development process is performed manually by a dentist and is prone to operator errors such as spots or poor image quality. Multiple commercial solution proposals are available in the market; however, these have limits such as cost, the use of rollers to move the plates, and low digital image resolution. The state of the art presents prototypes that allow the automatic development of dental radiographic plates moving the plate through the 3 development liquids. However, rollers used can impair the development process due to direct contact and friction between them and the radiographic plates, generating artifacts or small marks on the latter. Moreover, this roller mechanism requires frequent and expensive maintenance. On the other hand, dentists must buy one machine for photographic revealing and another one for digitization, since there is not a singular machine on the market that performs both processes. For these reasons, the proposed electronic equipment has an extendable arm that holds and moves the radiographic plates in a controlled and timed immersion of the plate in the different liquids depending on temperature. Then, the image is digitized and uploaded to a cloud storage service. Validation was done by comparing the proposed equipment’s developed images with those manually done by a dentist.