Diagnosis of the early carious lesion

In recent decades a desire has driven the uptake of the minimum intervention dentistry (MID) philosophy to end the destructive 'drill and fill' mentality prevalent amongst dental training programmes since the establishment of formalized dental training courses more than 100 years ago. This change in attitude has been concomitant with the decrease in caries prevalence in large sectors of the community and a better understanding of the caries process. One of the pivotal arms of MID is caries risk assessment, and early and accurate caries detection is a major part of this procedure. There is great variation between the diagnostic decisions between individual clinicians, and the development of valid detection aids may decrease this variation and improve the clinical decision making process as it relates to dental caries.