Longitudinal assessment of optical properties in early demineralization of enamel using pH cycling model
Document Type
Conference Item
Publication Date
1-1-2022
Abstract
Over the decades, examination of caries lesion has been performed conventionally by visual assessment where assessment methods such as ICDAS, and Nyvad Criteria were used as a reference to determine the severity of the caries. However, the conventional dental diagnosis was unable to detect early demineralization accurately due to the indistinct physical appearance of caries lesions at early stage. The objective of this research is to study the ability of optical coherence tomography (OCT) in diagnosing early demineralization of enamel layer without involving ionizing radiation. Sound human molar teeth samples were subjected to pH cycling for 3, 7, 14, 21 and 28 days to induce caries at the region of interest. Samples were scanned using OCT to assess the progression of demineralization, whereby the optical mean attenuation coefficient for each of the samples were extracted and compared. We found that the normalized mean attenuation of samples increased with the length of pH cycling, i.e. 1.33, 1.52 and 1.79 for 3, 7, and 14 days of pH cycling. The changes could be due to the increase of porosity in enamel layer. Irregular trend started to occur after 14 days, where to the normalized attenuation coefficient decreased on day 21 and then increased again on day 28, i.e. 1.46 and 1.65 respectively. Hypermineralization was suspected to happen after 14 days of pH cycling, causing irregular mineral concentration on the tooth surface. This study shows the potential use of optical properties from OCT system to detect early demineralization of the tooth. © 2022, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
Keywords
Enamels, Image segmentation, Ionizing radiation, Optical properties, Attenuation coefficient, Caries lesions, Demineralisation, Dental diagnosis, Enamel layers, Human molar teeth, Human teeths, PH cycling, Regions of interest, Visual assessments, Optical tomography
Divisions
biomedengine,oncology
Funders
Universiti Malaya [Grant no. GPF010C-2019]
Publication Title
IFMBE Proceedings
Volume
86
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH
Event Title
6th Kuala Lumpur International Conference on Biomedical Engineering, BioMed 2021
Event Location
Virtual, Online
Event Dates
28-29 July 2021
Event Type
conference