Clinical tests of an ultrasonic periodontal probe

Abstract

A new ultrasonic periodontal probe has been developed that offers the potential for earlier detection of periodontal disease activity, non-invasive diagnosis, and greater reliability of measurement. A comparison study of the ultrasonic probe to both a manual probe, and a controlled-force probe was conducted to evaluate its clinical effectiveness. Twelve patients enrolled into this study. Two halfmonth examinations were conducted on each patient, scheduled one hour apart. A one-way analysis of variance was performed to compare the results for the three sets of probing depth measurements, followed by a repeated measures analysis to assess the reproducibility of the different probing techniques. These preliminary findings indicate that manual and ultrasonic probing measure different features of the pocket. Therefore, it is not obvious how the two depth measurements correspond to each other. However, both methods exhibited a similar tendency toward increasing pocket depths as Gingival Index scores increased. Based on the small sample size, further studies need to be conducted using a larger population of patients exhibiting a wider range of disease activity. In addition, studies that allow histological examination of the pocket after probing will help further evaluate the clinical effectiveness of the ultrasonic probe. Future studies will also aid in the development of more effective automated feature recognition algorithms that convert the ultrasonic echoes into pocket depth readings.

Simulations of Ultrasonographic Periodontal Probe Using the Finite Integration Technique

“…Also in 1998, Companion and Hinders [41,42] first reported results of an ultrasonic periodontal probe that had been under development at NASA Langley for several years [43,44]. This ultrasonic periodontal probe [45][46][47][48][49] uses a hollow tapered tip that is filled with water for coupling of the ultrasonic beam into the tissues as shown in Fig. (1).…”

Ultrasonic Periodontal Probing Based on the Dynamic Wavelet Fingerprint

“…While these efforts proved the feasibility of ultrasonic imaging in dentistry, this version of the technique could not detect periodontal attachment loss, and failed to gain clinical acceptance. Recently, researchers have begun exploring new uses of ultrasound in dentistry [36,37,38,39] and studies have been conducted using ultrasound to image the periodontal pocket space by aiming the transducer apically into the pocket from the gingival margin [40,41,42,43,44,45,46]. The major technical barrier to this approach is providing an efficient coupling medium for the ultrasonic wave into the thin (0.25-0.5 mm) periodontal pocket.…”

“…As an initial effort to automate interpretation of the echoes, a time-domain procedure was developed to simplify the waveforms and infer the depth of the periodontal pocket [44,45,46]. This procedure used a slope-detection algorithm to pick peaks in the A-scan signal, followed by smoothing and averaging operations to eliminate small random variations.…”