METHOD AND DEVICE FOR STUDYING DENTAL RESTORATION MATERIALS ADHERENCE TO ENAMEL AND DENTIN

摘要

The invention relates to a method and a device for studying the adherence of dental restoration materials to enamel and dentin. The claimed device comprises a laser excitation source (2) which emits a laser beam which is very precisely directed onto the sample to be investigated by means of an electrically-controlled mirror system (7), a selective voltmeter (3), which generates a reference signal for the intensity-modulated laser, an infrared chamber (4) which registers the thermal signal generated by the sample and has incorporated a synchronous detection module for receiving both the thermal signal and the reference signal transmitted by the selective voltmeter (3), which processes the received signals and generates some images of amplitude and phase corresponding to the excitation frequency, images which are afterwards displayed on a computer screen (5) wherefrom they can be exported for subsequent processing. The claimed method consists in using infrared synchronous detection thermography coupled with contour recognition image processing algorithms to emphasize the useful information in the defect area and remove noises, to finally obtain a binary image, namely a pixel matrix with values of 0 or 1 which delivers the particular signature of the surface defect.