Lactobacillus treatment as adjuvant for geographic tongue and fissured tongue with gastritis: case report.

Background: Geographic tongue and fissured tongue are both common oral mucous membrane diseases relatively. The treatment of this disease is typically causative therapy because of the unknown etiology, and other afflictions. Gastrointestinal disease is one of the factors that induce geographic tongue with a fissured tongue. As an adjuvant drug that can inhibit the growth of Helicobacter pylori, the most common pathogen of chronic gastritis, Lactobacillus is widely used in clinic. However, there are seldom studies about Lactobacillus used in the treatment of geographic tongue and fissured tongue. Therefore, this case we used typically causative therapy with Lactobacillus as adjuvant to treat patient with a geographic tongue and fissured tongue with gastrointestinal disease and explore the effectiveness for further application. Case Description: A 33-year-old female patient presented with a geographic tongue and fissured tongue with dysgeusia. At the first visit, there were smooth red lesions on the back of the tongue with the hyperplasia of the surrounding filiform papilla. The cracks in the middle of the tongue had a crack of about 2.5 cm long and 0.8 cm deep, and 5-6 light cracks on the tip of the tongue. The patient reported a history of chronic gastritis for 1 year, often with soft stool and gastroesophageal reflux disease. We administered drug treatment, including sodium bicarbonate tablets, Kangfuxin solution, compound chlorhexidine solution, and stomatitis spray. In addition, we suggested the patient use a yogurt machine to make and drink fresh yogurt with Lactobacillus as adjuvant everyday day and suggested a daily regimen of a light diet with no stimulating food, regular work, and sufficient rest. Ten days after the first visit, the symptoms were obviously alleviated. Twenty days after the initial diagnosis, the geographic tongue lesions had disappeared and the cracks had basically healed. The patient reported that the gastric symptoms had improved, and there was no soft stool or stomach discomfort. Conclusions: This study used Lactobacillus as the adjuvant with typically causative therapy in the treatment of geographic tongue and fissured tongue.

Longitudinal investigation of idiopathic osteosclerosis lesions of the jaws in a group of Chinese orthodontically-treated patients using digital panoramic radiography.

BACKGROUND/PURPOSE: Idiopathic osteosclerosis (IO) is an intraosseous lesion of asymptomatic, non-expansive, radiopaque. The study aimed to investigate the prevalence and morphometric parameters of IO in orthodontic patients and variations in longitudinal observations and to assess the relationship between IO and orthodontic treatment. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Five hundred and seventy-one orthodontically-treated patients were reviewed. A cross-sectional study was performed with the evaluated parameters, including the age and sex of patients, as well as the number, shape, location and morphometric data of IO observed in panoramic radiography. Long-term behaviour of IO and orthodontic tooth movement were also observed. Also, a control group was set up for comparisons. RESULTS: Sixty-eight (11.3%) patients had 78 lesions all in the mandible with premolar/molar preference and no sex predilection. Lesions were located more commonly at apical and separate sites related to teeth. A large majority of lesions enlarged in the 10-19 years old group, while most lesions had no change in the 30-39 years old group. Hindrances of tooth movement and external root resorption around IO were not found in affected patients. CONCLUSION: IO is labile lesion that may develop in early stages of life, with little change occurring once the affected individual is mature and being relatively stable in the middle stage of life. Our study supports the hypothesis that IO may be developmental anatomic variations of normal bone. However, no obvious association between IO and orthodontic treatment was found in patients, which may be due to the limitations of two-dimensional shooting of panoramic radiography and the sample size.

Transformer-Based Deep Learning Network for Tooth Segmentation on Panoramic Radiographs.

Panoramic radiographs can assist dentist to quickly evaluate patients' overall oral health status. The accurate detection and localization of tooth tissue on panoramic radiographs is the first step to identify pathology, and also plays a key role in an automatic diagnosis system. However, the evaluation of panoramic radiographs depends on the clinical experience and knowledge of dentist, while the interpretation of panoramic radiographs might lead misdiagnosis. Therefore, it is of great significance to use artificial intelligence to segment teeth on panoramic radiographs. In this study, SWin-Unet, the transformer-based Ushaped encoder-decoder architecture with skip-connections, is introduced to perform panoramic radiograph segmentation. To well evaluate the tooth segmentation performance of SWin-Unet, the PLAGH-BH dataset is introduced for the research purpose. The performance is evaluated by F1 score, mean intersection and Union (IoU) and Acc, Compared with U-Net, Link-Net and FPN baselines, SWin-Unet performs much better in PLAGH-BH tooth segmentation dataset. These results indicate that SWin-Unet is more feasible on panoramic radiograph segmentation, and is valuable for the potential clinical application.

[Analysis of clinical and imaging findings in cementoblastoma].

OBJECTIVE: To assess the clinical and imaging features of cementoblastoma for diagnosis and differential diagnosis. METHODS: Clinical and imaging data of 14 cases were selected for this retrospective study. RESULTS: A total of 14 cases of cementoblastoma patients with ages at diagnosis ranging from 11 years to 58 years (mean age, 27.6 years; median age, 21.0 years). The tumor affected 7 patients from each gender. The mandible was the main site of occurrence. The most common complaints were swelling and pain. Radiographic results showed that cementoblastoma typically presented as a well-circumscribed and radiopaque mass confluent with the involved tooth root and surrounded by a thin and uniform radio-lucent border. Tumor parenchyma was generally mixed-density, which could be divided into two types, namely, homogeneous and heterogeneous patterns. Other significant imaging features included the periphery bone of the lesion sclerosis and cortical thickening of the lower edge of the mandible. CONCLUSION: Obvious characteristics are found in the clinical and imaging findings of cementoblastoma. Accurate recognition of this lesion is significant in clinic to avoid misdiagnoses.

Cone beam computed tomography signs of desmoplastic ameloblastoma: review of 7 cases.

OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to evaluate and summarize the radiographic features of desmoplastic ameloblastoma (DA) on cone beam computed tomography (CBCT) scans and to provide necessary further information for clinical diagnosis and preoperative assessment. STUDY DESIGN: Seven cases with pathologic diagnosis of DA were studied retrospectively. A CBCT scan of each individual was analyzed and compared with its corresponding plain (panoramic) radiograph. RESULTS: We found that 71.4% of lesions were located in the anterior or premolar regions (or both) and showed root displacement. With the advent of CBCT imaging, most DA lesions (57.1%) were perceived as having honeycomb appearance totally or dominantly. Distinctively, all the lesions presented cortical expansion with perforation in the buccal/labial side. CONCLUSIONS: The typical intralesional structure with honeycomb appearance and the dominant buccal/labial cortical expansion with perforation could be proposed as the characteristic features of DA on CBCT images. CBCT can provide more information for preoperative radiologic assessment of DA compared with panoramic radiography.

[Cone-beam CT features of ameloblastomas].

OBJECTIVE: To summarize and analyze the cone-beam CT (CBCT) imaging features of ameloblastomas for clinical preoperative diagnosis. METHODS: Thirty-seven cases with complete data proven by pathology were retrospectively studied for distinct CBCT features. RESULTS: Of the 37 cases, 31 were primary and 6 were recurrent. On CBCT images, the 37 cases were composed of 36 cases (97.3%) of intraosseous lesions (17 cases of multilocular lesions, 17 cases of unilocular lesions, and 2 cases of honeycomb lesion) and 1 case (2.7%) of extraosseous lesion (soft tissue lesion). Of the 17 multilocular cases, 15 (88.2%) showed tongue-shaped crests in lesions. Thirty-four cases (94.4%) showed apparent expansible change toward lip/buccal and (or) palatal/lingual sides ofjaw, with partialcortical erosion. CONCLUSION: CBCT imaging yields accurate three-dimensional images of lesion shape and structure. Therefore, CBCT can be usedfor the clinical diagnosis and surgical assessment of ameloblastoma.

[Analysis of imaging findings in jaw bone islands].

OBJECTIVE: To provide reference data on frequency and distribution of bone islands (BIs) and investigate their relationship with age, gender, and localization. METHODS: A population who received a pretreatment and at least one follow-up panoramic radiograph in the Department of Oral Radiology, West China Hospital of Stomatology, Sichuan University, were selected for this retrospective study. A sample population of 29,556 patients (12,824 males and 16,732 females) with different dental complaints and ages ranging from 8 to 80 years (mean age: 23.95 years) were included. RESULTS: In the radiographic evaluation, BIs appeared as localized, well-defined, non-expansile, radiopaque masses which were round, elliptic, or irregular in shape. Their sizes varied from a few millimeters to about 2 cm in diameter. A total of 598 radiopacities were detected, and 545 patients of 29,556 patients (1.84%) had BIs. Among subjects with multiple lesions, 49 patients had 2 BIs and 2 patients had 3 BIs. The BIs had immense mandibular predilection, with presentation primarily in the premolar/molar region. The condition appeared to have no tendencies based on sex. CONCLUSION: Recognition of BIs variation is significant in dental examinations.