| Popis: |
Dental caries occurs due to the demineralization of enamel and dentine by organic acids formed by bacteria in the dental plaque. The most common method for diagnosing occlusal plaques and caries is by visual or tactile examination of the occlusal surface. This assessment is subjective as it is based on the clinician's experience. Discrepancies in evaluations among clinicians lead to different approaches for the management of carious lesions. In this study, an automatic measurement method is presented to evaluate the plaque accumulations and caries areas quantitatively. In the presented algorithm, Wiener filter and unsharp masking methods were applied as a pre-processing stage to the green data matrix of digital images, respectively. Then, the threshold value was determined by applying the Fuzzy C means algorithm to the filtered images, and caries areas and plaque accumulations were determined. As a result, the algorithm's success rate in the presented study is 92,16% on average for plaque detection and 94,43% on average for caries detection. Additionally, an average dice similarity index of 0,926 and 0,977 were calculated for plaque and caries, respectively. |
