Li Jialin, Bowman Christopher, Fazel-Rezai Reza, Hewko Mark, Choo-Smith Lin-P'ing
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, R3T 5V6.
Annu Int Conf IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc. 2009;2009:1449-52. doi: 10.1109/iembs.2009.5332916.
The significance of identifying early non-cavitated carious lesions and monitoring the lesion extent has led to increasing prospects for prevention, early diagnosis, and implementation of conservative treatments. This paper emphasizes the importance of speckle reduction and possible lesion segmentation options of optical coherence tomography (OCT) images prior to caries detection. First, a comparison of popular speckle reduction filters is presented. These filtering algorithms were evaluated to measure the ability of different methods for reducing background noise from raw images. Both qualitative and quantitative results (signal-to-noise ratio, contrast-to-noise ratio) are reported. Image segmentation is then applied to multiple tooth images. With proper thresholding, high intensity response regions are outlined with the possibility of assessing caries and monitoring its regression. Our results show that a rotating kernel transformation (RKT) filter with 9x9 kernel size provides a good compromise between noise reduction yet preserving the pathological features of interest as required for subsequent feature segmentation analyses.
识别早期非空洞性龋损并监测病损范围的重要性，为预防、早期诊断以及实施保守治疗带来了越来越多的前景。本文强调了在龋齿检测之前，减少散斑以及光学相干断层扫描（OCT）图像可能的病损分割选项的重要性。首先，对流行的散斑减少滤波器进行了比较。对这些滤波算法进行了评估，以测量不同方法从原始图像中减少背景噪声的能力。报告了定性和定量结果（信噪比、对比噪声比）。然后将图像分割应用于多个牙齿图像。通过适当的阈值处理，勾勒出高强度响应区域，以便有可能评估龋齿并监测其消退情况。我们的结果表明，内核大小为9×9的旋转内核变换（RKT）滤波器在降噪和保留后续特征分割分析所需的感兴趣病理特征之间提供了良好的折衷。
