In vivo endoscopic optical coherence tomography of the healthy human oral mucosa: qualitative and quantitative image analysis

Research output: Contribution to journalResearch articleContributedpeer-review

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.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Article number827
JournalDiagnostics
Volume10
Issue number10
Publication statusPublished - 15 Oct 2020
Peer-reviewedYes

External IDs

ORCID /0000-0002-8160-3000/work/142248338
ORCID /0000-0002-7267-7016/work/142249524
ORCID /0000-0003-0554-2178/work/142249814
ORCID /0000-0003-2292-5533/work/142256554

Keywords

Sustainable Development Goals

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Keywords

  • Adults, histology, Endoscopy, Epithelial thickness, Healthy human oral mucosa, Noninvasive, Optical coherence tomography

Library keywords