Updating Health Technology Assessment Report; CBCT Technology: A Review Study

Abstract

Context: Cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT) is a medical imaging technology with various dental applications and diagnosis of oral and maxillofacial lesions. The current study mainly aimed at updating the safety and efficacy of CBCT technology.

Materials and Methods: This is a systematic review study of available evidence of CBCT technology. Since the time searching in the previous report was up to December 2010, electronic databases including Cochrane Library and Scopus were 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-texts of articles were not available; therefore, the authors of the articles were contacted and the full-texts were obtained. Also, non-English language articles were excluded from the study. The same design of the previous report was employed to extract data and information of the included articles. Due to the heterogeneity in studies, the qualitative and quantitative methods were employed to report the results.

Results: After removing duplicates, a total of 876 articles were included in the study. Finally, 23 studies reached the final analysis stage. In terms of quality, 13 articles were of average quality and 10 articles had good quality. Most of the studies were related to Iran (n = 5), Brazil (n = 4), Germany (n = 3), Britain, USA, Netherlands (n = 2), and Turkey, China, India, and Switzerland (n = 1). The included studies were conducted in 2011 (n = 8), 2012 (n = 6), 2013 (n = 5), and 2014 (n = 4). Totally, 1806 samples were reviewed in all the included studies. The most important reported results included sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, positive and negative predictive values, and area under the curve; 86.3% of the studies reported sensitivity and specificity (n = 19), accuracy (n = 8), and area under the curve (n = 8). Positive and negative predictive values were 36.3% and 27.2%, respectively.

Conclusions: CBCT is a highly sensitive imaging tool for the diagnosis of various oral lesions. However, due to the limited number of clinical trials and the lack of evidence, further studies are needed to obtain more conclusive results.