Technische Universität Dresden, Faculty of Medicine Carl Gustav Carus, Anesthesiology and Intensive, Germany.
Technische Universität Dresden, Faculty of Medicine Carl Gustav Carus, Policlinic of Operative and P, Germany.
J Biomed Opt. 2018 Jan;23(7):1-8. doi: 10.1117/1.JBO.23.7.071203.
As dental caries is one of the most common diseases, the early and noninvasive detection of carious lesions plays an important role in public health care. Optical coherence tomography (OCT) with its ability of depth-resolved, high-resolution, noninvasive, fast imaging has been previously recognized as a promising tool in dentistry. Additionally, polarization sensitive imaging provides quantitative measures on the birefringent tissue properties and can be utilized for imaging dental tissue, especially enamel and dentin. By imaging three exemplary tooth samples ex vivo with proximal white spot, brown spot, and cavity, we show that the combination of polarization sensitive OCT and the degree of polarization uniformity (DOPU) algorithm is a promising approach for the detection of proximal carious lesions due to the depolarization contrast of demineralized tissue. Furthermore, we investigate different sizes of the DOPU evaluation kernel on the resulting contrast and conclude a suitable value for this application. We propose that DOPU provides an easy to interpret image representation and appropriate contrast for possible future screening applications in early caries diagnostics.
由于龋齿是最常见的疾病之一，因此早期、非侵入性的龋损检测在公共卫生保健中起着重要作用。光学相干断层扫描（OCT）具有深度分辨、高分辨率、非侵入性、快速成像的能力，以前被认为是一种很有前途的牙科工具。此外，偏振敏感成像提供了关于双折射组织特性的定量测量方法，可用于对牙齿组织，尤其是牙釉质和牙本质进行成像。通过对三个离体的具有近中面白斑、棕色斑和龋洞的牙齿样本进行成像，我们表明偏振敏感 OCT 与偏振度均匀度（DOPU）算法的结合是检测近中面龋损的一种很有前途的方法，因为脱矿组织的去偏振对比度。此外，我们研究了不同大小的 DOPU 评估核对结果对比度的影响，并得出了这种应用的合适值。我们提出，DOPU 为未来可能的早期龋齿诊断中的筛查应用提供了一种易于解释的图像表示和合适的对比度。
