Determination of Mineral Changes in Human Dental Enamel by Longitudinal Microradiography and Scanning Optical Monitoring and Their Correlation with Chemical Analysis

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Abstract
Both longitudinal microradiography (LMR) and scanning optical monitoring (OM) are non-destructive methods for measuring mineral changes in dental tooth enamel slices with time at 169 locations on the slice. Average calcium losses from four human tooth enamel slices (300-400 micron thickness), etched in HClO4, were determined by LMR and chemical analysis (C). As predicted from theory, LMR and C correlate very well (r = 0.99), but the appearance of a systematic error of unknown source of 30% made with LMR, C, or both could not be avoided. Another, more complex, experiment concerned six human tooth enamel slices of the same thickness which were demineralized in an aqueous buffered acid solution containing Ca and PO4. From this experiment it was found that average calcium loss as measured by C and LMR correlated well with the optical scattering as measured with scanning OM (Spearman rank correlation rs approximately equal to 0.79). It was also found that three-dimensional plots of local calcium loss by LMR and scanning OM as a function of tooth slice surface position show a well-defined tooth-dependent increase due to local demineralization and rather similar behaviour with time. From the experiments it follows that LMR and scanning OM are reliable methods to determine the mineral change in a tooth tissue as a function of local tooth slice surface position and of time and that with LMR and scanning OM time- and position-dependent measurements with an oral device become feasible.

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