In Vivo Endoscopic Optical Coherence Tomography of the Healthy Human Oral Mucosa: Qualitative and Quantitative Image Analysis

Abstract

To date, there is still a lack of reliable imaging modalities to improve the quality of consultation, diagnostic and medical examinations of the oral mucosa in dentistry. Even though, optical technologies have become an important element for the detection and treatment of different diseases of soft tissue, for the case of oral screenings the evidence of the benefit in comparison to conventional histopathology is mostly still pending. One promising optical technology for oral diagnostics is optical coherence tomography (OCT). To prove the potential of OCT, even the amount of freely accessible OCT data is not sufficient to describe the variance of healthy human oral soft tissue in vivo. In order to remedy this deficiency, the present study provides in vivo OCT cross sections of the human oral mucosa of the anterior and posterior oral cavity as well as the oropharynx of 47 adult volunteers. A collection of representative OCT cross sections forms the basis for a randomized blinded image analysis by means of seven criteria to assess the main features of the superficial layers of the human oral mucosa and to determine its correlation to regional features known from hematoxylin and eosin (HE) stained histology.

A Handheld Fiber-Optic Probe to Enable Optical Coherence Tomography of Oral Soft Tissue

“…Comparing the OCT images of the buccal mucosa (Patients II,III,IV) and alveolar mucosa (Patients V and VI), we quantified the mean epithelial thicknesses as 158 µm and 96 µm, respectively. This is in broad agreement with our earlier studies on epithelial thickness using a larger, more unwieldy OCT probe [32].…”

“…3d suggests that the basement membrane is intact. Using the technique described in [32], we quantified the epithelial thickness here to be 395 µm, using a refractive index of n = 1.4 for the epithelium at a wavelength of λ = 1300 nm [33]. We note that the layers are less distinct in Fig.…”

Real-Time Monitoring and Quantitative Evaluation of Resin In-Filtrant Repairing Enamel White Spot Lesions Based on Optical Coherence Tomography

“…At present, the application of OCT mainly focuses on the imaging of eyes [24,25], skin [26], and cardiovascular tissues [27] as well as other biological tissues. The application of OCT in stomatology is gradually being explored, especially in early diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis monitoring of dental caries, periodontitis, and oral mucosal diseases [28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35].…”

Optical-Mechanical Configuration of Imaging Operation for Endoscopic Scanner: A Review

“…Fig. 2 summarizes tissue images reconstructed using information obtained from confocal microscopy [23], fluorescence microscopy [17], [24], and OCT [25]. Confocal microscopy offers the elimination of out-of-focus glare by using pinhole aperture to produce a high-resolution image but at a shallow penetration depth (<100 µm) [26].…”