Modelling laser speckle photographs of decayed teeth by applying a digital image information technique

We report on the application of a digital image model to assess early carious lesions on teeth. When decay is in its early stages, the lesions were illuminated with a laser and the laser speckle images were obtained. Due to the differences in the optical properties between healthy and carious tissue, both regions produced different scatter patterns. The digital image information technique allowed us to produce colour-coded 3D surface plots of the intensity information in the speckle images, where the height (on the z-axis) and the colour in the rendering correlate with the intensity of a pixel in the image. The quantitative changes in colour component density enhance the contrast between the decayed and sound tissue, and visualization of the carious lesions become significantly evident. Therefore, the proposed technique may be adopted in the early diagnosis of carious lesions.