Cross-sectional and en-face depolarization imaging for the assessment of dental lesions

Abstract

Dental caries is one of the most widespread diseases and the early and non-invasive detection of carious lesions remains an ongoing topic in biomedical research. In contrast, optical coherence tomography (OCT) is an emerging, non-invasive imaging technique for near-surface structures, that has already proved its capability for manifold biomedical applications and can be extended by several modalities such as polarization sensitivity. We have recently shown that polarization sensitive OCT combined with an algorithm for depolarization imaging, visualizing the degree of polarization uniformity (DOPU), is a promising tool for the detection and assessment of carious lesions. In this paper, we evaluate different visualization approaches based on both the intensity and DOPU data with cross-sectional and en-face representations and discuss limitations and the potential of the proposed method for the assessment of dental lesions on the example of a molar tooth with a brown spot.

Keywords

• optical coherence tomography
• polarimetry
• dental caries
• depolarization
• biomedical imaging
• dentistry