Panoramic films are extraoral films, in which the film is exposed while outside the patients' mouth, and they were developed by the United States Army as a quick way to get an overall view of a soldiers' oral health. Exposing eighteen films per soldier was very time consuming, and it was felt that a single panoramic film could speed up the process of examining and assessing the dental health of the soldiers; soldiers with toothaches are not very effective. It was later discovered that while panoramic films can prove very useful in detecting and localizing mandibular fractures and other pathologic entities of the mandible, they were not very good at assessing periodontal bone loss or tooth decay.
