The most common imaging methods used in dentistry are X-ray imaging and RGB color photography. However, both imaging methods provide only a limited amount of information on the wavelength-dependent optical properties of the hard and soft tissues in the mouth. Spectral imaging, on the other hand, provides significantly more information on the medically relevant dental and oral features (e.g. caries, calculus, and gingivitis). Due to this, we constructed a spectral imaging setup and acquired 316 oral and dental reflectance spectral images, 215 of which are annotated by medical experts, of 30 human test subjects. Spectral images of the subjects’ faces and other areas of interest were captured, along with other medically relevant information (e.g., pulse and blood pressure). We collected these oral, dental, and face spectral images, their annotations and metadata into a publicly available database that we describe in this paper. This oral and dental spectral image database (ODSI-DB) provides a vast amount of data that can be used for developing, e.g., pattern recognition and machine vision applications for dentistry.
Dental lesions such as calculus and initial caries can be challenging to distinguish in RGB colour images due to a poor contrast. The visibility of dental lesions can be improved by using spectrally optimised light sources. In this paper, the optimal spectral shapes of illuminants for the visibility enhancement of various lesions are determined. These optimal spectral shapes are determined computationally by using spectral images captured from extracted human teeth, and numerical optimisation.
In optical imaging, optical filters can be used to enhance the visibility of featuresof-interest and thus aid in visualization. Optical filter design based on hyperspectral imaging employs various statistical methods to find an optimal design. Some methods, like principal component analysis, produce vectors that can be interpreted as filters that have a partially negative transmission spectrum. These filters, however, are not directly implementable optically. Earlier implementations of partially negative filters have concentrated on spectral reconstruction. Here we show a novel method for implementing partially negative optical filters for contrast-enhancement purposes in imaging applications. We describe the method and its requirements, and show its feasibility with color chart and dental imaging examples. The results are promising: visual comparison of computational color chart render and optical measurement show matching images, and visual inspection of dental images show increased contrast.
The aim of this work is automatic and efficient detection of medically-relevant features from oral and dental hyperspectral images by applying up-to-date deep learning convolutional neural network techniques. This will help dentists to identify and classify unhealthy areas automatically
and to prevent the progression of diseases. Hyperspectral imaging approach allows one to do so without exposing the patient to ionizing X-ray radiation. Spectral imaging provides information in the visible and near-infrared wavelength ranges. The dataset used in this paper contains 116 hyperspectral
images from 18 patients taken from different viewing angles. Image annotation (ground truth) includes 38 classes in six different sub-groups assessed by dental experts. Mask region-based convolutional neural network (Mask R-CNN) is used as a deep learning model, for instance segmentation of
areas. Preliminary results show high potential and accuracy for classification and segmentation of different classes.
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