Aim: The aim of this study was to assess the incidence, location, and sizes of the accessory mental foramina using cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT).Materials and methods: The CBCT records of 1400 Caucasian race patients were evaluated for accessory mental foramina (AMF). Their presence and location in relation to the mental foramen (MF) were assessed using axial, panoramic, and cross-sectional 2-dimensional CBCT images. The long and short axes diameters of the AMF were also measured.Results: Accessory mental foramina were observed in 3.86 % of the patients: up to two foramina on one side, unilaterally presented in 94.4% of cases with AMF. Their location regrading MF was distally and inferiorly in 62.9%. In 35.5 % of cases with AMF the foramen was situated above the level of MF and therefore needs special attention before surgery.The mean inner long and short axis diameters were 1.5 mm (SD:0.4 mm) and 1.2 mm (SD:0.3 mm) respectively. The measurements ranged from 0.7 - 2.5 mm for the long axis and 0.7 - 2 mm for the short axis.Conclusion: Demonstration of AMF using CBCT can improve the surgery treatment planning in anterior part of the mandible and thus helps to avoid unwanted neurovascular damage and possible malpractice litigations.
Image steganography is a multi-purpose serving key emerging technology that is used for covertly transferring, storing and governing various digital data including intellectual properties and copyrights, social media data, multimedia data, secrets of law-enforcing agencies. During the management in the stated information, now-a-days, big data are handled which require stronger security. For that purpose data are embedded into a cover image to hide them from the intruders. That hiding is performed both by reversible mechanism (where the hided information and the cover image are extracted from the modified image) and irreversible policy (cover image cannot be generated). Reversible schemes provide stronger data security while irreversible schemes present higher embedding payload. In this paper, the authors have presented a novel irreversible data embedding scheme where the data embedding policy of prediction-error-histogram based reversible data hiding scheme is applied to boost up the embedding payload and the data security. A distance matrix between the image pixels and a reference value is measured first. Thereafter, the distances are encoded into two states- one and minus one. That encoding process makes the scheme enable to implant one bit in every pixel of the cover image. The use of a reference value reduces the computational complexity notably and in the meanwhile increases the security and robustness of the scheme because the reference value is not open to any third party. The scheme also reduces the time complexity by 2 to 16 times with compared to its competing scheme. Experimental results prove the superiority of the proposed algorithm on embedding capacity, visual quality and time complexity compared to the well-accepted existing schemes.