Optical coherence tomography (OCT) has been widely used for the diagnosis of dental demineralization. Most methods rely on extracting optical features from OCT echoes for evaluation or diagnosis. However, due to the diversity of biological samples and the complexity of tissues, the separability and robustness of extracted optical features are inadequate, resulting in a low diagnostic efficiency. Given the widespread utilization of entropy analysis in examining signals from biological tissues, we introduce a dental demineralization diagnosis method using OCT echoes, employing multiscale entropy analysis. Three multiscale entropy analysis methods were used to extract features from the OCT one-dimensional echo signal of normal and demineralized teeth, and a probabilistic neural network (PNN) was used for dental demineralization diagnosis. By comparing diagnostic efficiency, diagnostic speed, and parameter optimization dependency, the multiscale dispersion entropy-PNN (MDE-PNN) method was found to have comprehensive advantages in dental demineralization diagnosis with a diagnostic efficiency of 0.9397. Compared with optical feature-based dental demineralization diagnosis methods, the entropy features-based analysis had better feature separability and higher diagnostic efficiency, and showed its potential in dental demineralization diagnosis with OCT.
Keywords: diagnosis of dental demineralization; multiscale dispersion entropy; optical coherence tomography; probabilistic neural network.