Dielectric Characterization of Healthy Human Teeth from 0.5 to 18 GHz with an Open-Ended Coaxial Probe

Abstract

Dental caries is a major oral health issue which compromises oral health, as it is the main cause of oral pain and tooth loss. Early caries detection is essential for effective clinical intervention. However, methods commonly employed for its diagnosis often fail to detect early caries lesions, which motivates the research for more effective diagnostic solutions. In this work, the relative permittivity of healthy permanent teeth, in caries-prone areas, was studied between 0.5 and 18 GHz. The reliability of such measurements is an important first step to, ultimately, evaluate the feasibility of a microwave device for caries detection. The open-ended coaxial probe technique was employed. Its performance showed to be compromised by the poor probe-tooth contact. We proposed a method based on applying coupling media to reduce this limitation. A decrease in the measured relative permittivity variability was observed when the space between the probe tip and tooth surface was filled by coupling media instead of air. The influence of the experimental conditions in the measurement result was found to be less than 5%. Measurements conducted in ex vivo teeth showed that the relative permittivity of the dental crown and root ranges between 10.0–11.0 and 8.0–9.5, respectively.

Non-destructive testing of human teeth using microwaves: a state-of-the-art review

“…Berezhanska et al [19,20] introduced the concept of coupling liquids in ultrasonics to alleviate the negative effect of the air gap. It is noted that the meaning of coupling is different in each method: in ultrasonics the liquid is used to reduce the great energy loss of the ultrasonic signal in the air; here it is used to offer a reference permittivity.…”