Scattering Coefficient Estimation Using Thin-Film Phantoms with a Spectral-Domain Dental OCT System.

Area of Science:

• Biomedical Optics
• Optical Imaging
• Dental Technology

Background:

• Optical scattering properties are crucial for understanding tissue optics.
• Dental Optical Coherence Tomography (DEN-OCT) offers high-resolution imaging capabilities.
• Accurate characterization of scattering is essential for biomedical applications.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and validate a framework for estimating optical scattering properties of thin-film phantoms.
• To assess the performance of a custom-built Spectral-Domain Dental Optical Coherence Tomography (DEN-OCT) system.
• To demonstrate the potential of DEN-OCT for quantitative analysis in dental and biomedical imaging.

Main Methods:

• Fabrication of thin-film phantoms with controlled optical characteristics.
• Utilized a custom-built Spectral-Domain Dental Optical Coherence Tomography (DEN-OCT) system (780-900 nm).
• Applied Beer-Lambert and diffusion approximation models, spectrophotometry, and Monte Carlo simulations for analysis.

Main Results:

• The DEN-OCT system achieved high depth-resolved imaging (16.30 µm axial resolution, 2.5 mm effective range).
• Phantoms exhibited distinct scattering profiles mimicking hard and soft tissues.
• Attenuation coefficients derived from OCT A-scans correlated with spectrophotometric data, indicating scattering dominance.

Conclusions:

• The integrated framework provides a reliable method for quantitative scattering estimation in dental OCT.
• The developed DEN-OCT system shows significant potential for advanced dental and biomedical imaging.
• This work establishes a validated pathway for extracting quantitative optical parameters using OCT.