Tissue differentiation by diffuse reflectance spectroscopy forautomated oral and maxillofacial laser surgery: ex vivo pilot study

摘要

Remote laser surgery lacks of haptic feedback during the laser ablation of tissue. Hence, there is a risk of iatrogenicdamage or destruction of anatomical structures like nerves or salivary glands. Diffuse reflectance spectroscopy providesa straightforward and simple approach for optical tissue differentiation. We measured diffuse reflectance from sevenvarious tissue types ex vivo. We applied Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) to differentiate the seven tissue types andcomputed the area under the ROC curve (AUC). Special emphasis was taken on the identification of nerves and salivaryglands as the most crucial tissue for maxillofacial surgery. The results show a promise for differentiating tissues asguidance for oral and maxillofacial laser surgery by means of diffuse reflectance.