Inter-microscope comparability of dental microwear texture data obtained from different optical profilometers

Abstract

Dental microware texture analysis has become a well-established approach for dietary inference and reconstruction of mammals and other tetrapods, both extant and extinct. As the amount of available data grows immensely, researchers could benefit from combining data gathered by others to perform meta-analyses. However, different devices used to capture three-dimensional surface scans for DMTA are known to produce variation even when measuring the same surface. Here we compare DMTA data of 36 guinea pigs that received different diets in a controlled feeding experiment, measured on a confocal disc-scanning and a confocal laser-scanning microscope. We are testing different pre-analysis filtering protocols to mitigate differences. We find inter-microscopes and filter-related differences for the majority of analysed 41 DMTA parameters. Certain microscope-specific filter routines resulted in less differences than other pre-analysis protocols. We further identify DMTA parameters which were stable regardless of microscope or pre-analysis treatment. Overall, the results obtained on both microscopes show the same dietary differentiation between guinea pig feeding groups, which supports that DMTA is a suitable method to obtain repeatable, objective dietary inferences. We finally propose a roadmap to enhance data exchange and inter-lab comparability and collaboration in the future.

Mandible microwear texture analysis of crickets raised on diets of different abrasiveness reveals universality of diet-induced wear

“…Supplementary material is available online [47]. royalsocietypublishing.org/journal/rsfs Interface Focus 14: 20230065…”

“…Therefore, absolute parameter values are not immediately comparable. In a pilot study, Winkler & Kubo [ 43 ] showed that inter-microscope differences exist when scanning the same dataset. But they also showed that even though parameter values differ, relative differences between diet groups are consistently reproduced on different microscopes.…”