In Pursuit Of An Optimum Optical Imaging Technology For Early Detection Of Dental Caries

In the last two decades, majority of the newly developed dental caries detection techniques have been optics-based, relying either on enhancement of light scattering in early carious lesion (e.g. optical coherent tomography or OCT) or enhancement of light absorption in early caries (e.g. thermophotonic lock-in imaging or TPLI). This paper aims to explore the detection threshold capabilities between light scattering and light absorption based dental caries detection methods. With this intention, the experiments will be conducted through examination of controlled artificially-induced early caries. It is anticipated that the molecular-contrast TPLI imaging technology outperforms OCT due to the more specific