Highly effective techniques in computerized dental tissue morphometry

摘要

The effectiveness of computer‐aided morphometry is greatly dependent of the capabilities of the software platforms, but the literatutre provides only information about the measurement methods and thier medical interpretation. The purpose of our work is to create a link between the technical algorithm and the medical significance, by a detialed description of measurement procedures, accompained by the interpretation of thier results. The developmed techniques operate at a pixel level, by deriving a full benefit from the computational resources avilable in the modern software evnvironments for image processing. The approach is built on three illustrative cases, formulated in a large sense, so as to cover classes of general problems, referring to cellular entities and tubular structures in cross and longitudinal section. Specimens belonging to the dentin‐pulp complex were chosen, because they permit a quantitiative analysis for each morphological element, as well as comparative discussion. With appropriate adaptations of the procedures, the measurements of other types of normal and pathological tissues and be analogously addressd. The design, implementation and exploittion of our procedures are supported by specific references to the use of an image analysis system (Zeiss KS400). The algorithmic background remains valid (except for some possible minor changes) when similar software is used. Consequently, the results and thier interpretations, prove the importance of the numerical analysis in automating the quantitative evaluation of the structural features.