Detecting Early Tooth Decay

“Both low-coherence light and ultrashort laser pulses can be used to measure internal structure in biological systems. An optical signal that is transmitted through or reflected from a biological tissue will contain time-of-flight information, which in turn yields spatial information about tissue microstructure.”

So began Huang et al. 20 years ago in the journal Science to describe their initial efforts to adapt a non-invasive fiberoptic imaging technique called optical coherence tomography, or OCT, to view tissues in the body. In this case, they visualized the retina and coronary artery. Five years later, Colston et al. applied OCT to the periodontal tissues of a pig, showing clearly the physical boundaries of the gingiva from the tooth and the tooth’s enamel from the cementum. This study marked the first time that OCT had imaged a hard biologic tissue successfully.

Since these groundbreaking papers, OCT is often employed with a polarization sensitive (PS) feature, creating the designation PS-OCT. The PS feature eliminates reflection from the tissue surface and monitors changes to the incident polarized light due to structural changes in the tissue.

For the complete article: http://www.nidcr.nih.gov/Research/ResearchResults/ScienceBriefs/Archive/SNIB2011/February/ToothDecay.htm

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