Dental hard tissue lesions, such as caries, cracked-tooth, and so on, are known as

the most prevalent diseases of people worldwide. According to up-to-date

epidemiological investigation, there has been a remarkable increase in the
prevalence of dental caries recently in all age range, including children, adults and
elderly people. Detection, assessment, and diagnostics of carious lesions is an
important procedure for clinicians in daily dental practice to enable them for well-
justified preventive, non-operative, or operative caries management.
Visual and radiographic examinations are the most widely used methods for dental
disease diagnosis currently.
Researchers are still looking for advanced utility methods that can significantly
improve the sensitivity and specificity for objective assessment of early lesions in
the teeth
Photoacoustic Imaging, non-invasively image the teeth structure and detect the
early dental lesion. However, the current studies mostly focused on the soft tissue.
Seldom applications have been done to the hard tissue, such as tooth. This device
is devoted to imaging the human tooth and detecting the early lesion, moderate and
advanced lesion in the dental hard tissue.
Photoacoustic Unit :

1. Laser unit with collimation tube

2. Teeth Probe
3. Connecting tubes for hollow optical fibers
4. Software to collect and read Data
Imaging procedure:

Photoacoustic imaging will be performed by pulsing light through two optical fiber
bundles integrated with both sides of a rectangular, linear array transducer. The
laser excitation (Q-switched Nd:YAG) used 5 ns to 9 ns pulses at 10 Hz to 20 Hz
(6 Hz to 8 Hz frame rate). The ultrasound resolution will be controlled by changing
between three transducers: LZ-201 (center frequency = 16 MHz), LZ-250 (center
frequency = 21 MHz), and LZ-550 (center frequency = 40 MHz). Typical gains are
15 dB for photoacoustic signal and 10 dB for ultrasound. Operator will put on near-
infrared protective laser goggles during experiments. A layer of ultrasound gel will
apply to the transducer, which will adjusted to 1 cm from the tooth. The 532 nm to
680 nm laser will initialize, and the stepper motor will scanned 17 mm (0.076 mm
step size) to obtain a 3D PA-US image via maximum intensity projection.