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. 2016 Apr 28:6:25259.
doi: 10.1038/srep25259.

A new hand-held optical reflectometer to measure enamel erosion: correlation with surface hardness and calcium release

Thiago Saads Carvalho  1 , Tommy Baumann  1 , Adrian Lussi  1
Affiliations

A new hand-held optical reflectometer to measure enamel erosion: correlation with surface hardness and calcium release

Thiago Saads Carvalho et al. Sci Rep. .

Abstract

In the present study, the surface reflection intensity (SRI) was measured from enamel with different induced erosion degrees using a hand-held pen-size reflectometer (Hand-Held) and a Table-Top reflectometer. To validate the Hand-Held reflectometer, we correlated its optical signals with the change of surface microhardness (SMH), and amount of calcium released from the enamel samples during erosion. We used 124 tooth enamel specimens that were exposed to an erosive challenge of either 1, 2, 4, 6, 8, or 10 minutes. SRI and SMH were measured before and after the erosive challenge and we also measured the amount of calcium released to the citric acid. Relative SRI loss (rSRIloss) and relative SMH loss (rSMHloss) were calculated. rSRIloss from the Hand-Held and the Table-Top reflectometers were similar and significantly correlated to rSMHloss and calcium release. The regression analyses showed a significant association between rSRIloss from both reflectometers and rSMHloss and calcium, showing that both reflectometers can be used to measure erosive demineralization of enamel. The Hand-Held reflectometer is capable of assessing in vitro erosion, correlating to other commonly used methods. It is small, easy to handle and provides fast measurement, being a possible candidate to measure erosion in clinical studies.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1. Relative surface reflection intensity loss (rSRI) from the Table-Top (1a) and Hand-Held (1b) devices after different erosion times.
Figure 2
Figure 2. Relative surface microhardness loss (rSMH; 2a) and calcium released from the specimens (2b) after different erosion times.
Figure 3
Figure 3. Association between the relative surface reflection intensity loss (rSRI) from the Table-Top (◻) and Hand-Held (△) devices with relative surface microhardness loss (3a) and calcium (after loge-transformation) released from the specimens (3b).
Solid line: regression for Table-Top device; dashed line: regression for Hand-Held device.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

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