Can tongue shadow in panoramic radiographs be avoided by using the tongue repositioning maneuver?

A selection of abstracts of clinically relevant papers from other journals. The abstracts on this page have been chosen and edited by John R. Radford.

Abstract

A simple and low cost tongue manoeuvre to obtain better panoramic radiographs.

Main

Cordesmeyer R, Engelke W et al. Oral Surg Oral Med Oral Pathol Oral Radiol 2016; 121: e175–180

Some indictment, with one third of panoramic radiographs rated as 'unacceptable'. Indeed, only about 1% of such radiographs were free of errors. Positioning errors such as the dark shadow when there is a space between the tongue and palate resulting in a radiolucent shadow over the roots of the maxillary teeth accounts for about half of these errors. In this study, the investigators determined if a tongue repositioning manoeuvre reduced the occurrence of this radiolucent shadow. This tongue manoeuvre, first described over 10 years ago, is when the patient is asked to swallow and to keep the tongue in that position against the hard palate during the taking of the radiograph. Using this tongue manoeuvre, the tongue/palate distance reduced dramatically from about 7 mm to 2 mm compared with a control 'conventional positioning technique'. Despite this, about one quarter of radiographs still showed a visible tongue space.