Detection of dental caries lesion at early stage based on image analysis technique

Abstract

Dental caries is a bacterial disease of teeth caused by acid, carbohydrates and it destroys the enamel and dentine. This also causes dental pain. As per World Health Organization report, worldwide 60–90% children and 100% adult have dental caries [1]. In near future it will be an epidemic. Unfortunately there is no highly sensitive technology for early caries detection. Besides that, no single method will allow detection of caries on all types of the tooth surfaces like enamel, dentin region etc. Hence periodic monitoring and treatment is essential for preventing the growth of the caries. It is difficult for doctor to monitor the progress of each dental caries lesion. That case, x-ray images are helpful, but it is injurious to health. Hence optical image based caries monitoring system is advantageous for doctor to monitor the size of the caries. This method is not injurious to health. The proposed method describes a technique where optical images of teeth are filtered and caries lesions are extracted followed by tooth region segmentation. This system is able to segment each tooth, caries lesion and monitor the growth of lesion size. The main goal of this research work is to find the exact caries lesion of affected teeth which helps dentist for better follow-up and diagnosis.