Construction of a standardized near infrared (NIR) hyper-spectral teeth database is a first step in the development of a reliable diagnostic tool for quantification and early detection of dental diseases. The standardized diffuse reflectance hyper-spectral database was constructed by imaging 12 extracted human teeth with natural lesions of various degrees in the spectral range from 900 to 1700 nm with spectral resolution of 10 nm. Additionally, all the teeth were imaged by X-ray and digital color camera. The color and X-ray teeth images were presented to the expert for localization and classification of the dental diseases, thereby obtaining a dental disease gold standard. Accurate transfer of the dental disease gold standard to the NIR images was achieved by image registration in a groupwise manner, taking advantage of the multichannel image information and promoting image edges as the features for the improvement of spatial correspondence detection. By the presented fully automatic multi-modal groupwise registration method, images of new teeth samples can be accurately and reliably registered and then added to the standardized NIR hyper-spectral teeth database. Adding more samples increases the biological and patho-physiological variability of the NIR hyper-spectral teeth database and can importantly contribute to the objective assessment of the sensitivity and specificity of multivariate image analysis techniques used for the detection of dental diseases. Such assessment is essential for the development and validation of reliable qualitative and especially quantitative diagnostic tools based on NIR spectroscopy.

Date Published: 11 March 2011
PDF: 10 pages
Proc. SPIE 7962, Medical Imaging 2011: Image Processing, 79622A (11 March 2011); doi: 10.1117/12.877940

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 7962:
Medical Imaging 2011: Image Processing
Benoit M. Dawant; David R. Haynor, Editor(s)