DENTAL AUTORADIOGRAPHY II. EFFECT OF PRINTING TECHNICS ON INTERPRETATION

¹ Radioisotope Unit and Dental Research Laboratory, Veterans Administration Hospital, Coral Gables, Fla.

Technics employed in the autoradiographic portrayal of tooth structure are described. It is shown that in the study of hard tissues such as the tooth, it is advantageous to make a series of exposures of the radioactive specimen of progressively longer duration to the photographic film, and likewise to make photographic prints from the various autoradiograms of similarly variable exposure times and of contrast, so as to bring out, in the different prints, the detail afforded by areas of varied porosity. Attention is drawn to the parallelism between optical characteristics as seen in the photograph and those seen in the print from the autoradiogram. It is shown that regions which photographically might suggest dentinal destruction may instead be revealed in the autoradiograms as areas of increased resistance to decay.