Photoacoustic imaging of teeth for dentine imaging and enamel characterization

• Main Authors: Periyasamy, Vijitha, Rangaraj, Mani, Pramanik, Manojit
• Other Authors: School of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering
• Format: Conference or Workshop Item
• Language: English
• Published: 2018
• Subjects: Photoacoustics Tomography; Photoacoustic Microscopy
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/87349; http://hdl.handle.net/10220/44464
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Early detection of dental caries, cracks and lesions is needed to prevent complicated root canal treatment and tooth extraction procedures. Resolution of clinically used x-ray imaging is low, hence optical imaging techniques such as optical coherence tomography, fluorescence imaging, and Raman imaging are widely experimented for imaging dental structures. Photoacoustic effect is used in photon induced photoacoustic streaming technique to debride the root canal. In this study, the extracted teeth were imaged using photoacoustic tomography system at 1064 nm. The degradation of enamel and dentine is an indicator of onset of dental caries. Photoacoustic microscopy (PAM) was used to study the tooth enamel. Images were acquired using acoustic resolution PAM system. This was done to identify microscopic cracks and dental lesion at different anatomical sites (crown and cementum). The PAM tooth profile is an indicator of calcium distribution which is essential for demineralization studies.