Optical Fiber Lightening for Fluorescence Signal Detection with Thermal Stability in Dentistry

Abstract

Dental caries diagnosis system has been made with a fiber lighting, camera module and band pass filter. By simply aligning a 405 nm LED (Light Emitting diode) chips directly connected polymer fibers, a compact lighting for dental fluorescence imaging could be implemented. Special designed fiber holder with proper hole diameter was fabricated to directly connect polymer fibers with 1 mm fiber diameter and increased coupling efficiency between fibers and LEDs. Fibers connected to fiber holder were polished by polishing machine to reduce insertion loss of the fiber. Experimentally, an optical insertion loss of the fiber bundle of up to 0.8 dB was achieved. Further, LED array module was packaged with equally spaced LED chips with fiber holder on metal. Fiber lightening was fabricated with directly coupled between LED array module and fiber bundle by UV epoxy without focusing lens in order to lower the lightening temperature of intraoral camera in the human mouth. The measured temperature of fabricated fiber lightening was about 25 degree celcius. To achieve a fluorescence image and dental caries diagnosis, the proper optical filter, camera module, 405 nm fiber bundle lighting and software were investigated. The performance of the fluorescence intraoral camera with fiber lightening is confirmed by fluorescence image of human tooth.