Newswise — RUDN University dentists showed how tomography, microfocus or medical, will help archaeologists and paleontologists in taxonomic and evolutionary studies. To do this, they developed a program that details and accurately determines the thickness of the enamel of fossil teeth. This approach should replace traditional manual methods and improve the accuracy of research. The results were published in the Journal of Imaging.
Teeth are one of the most important paleontological finds. From them, scientists can judge evolutionary processes and the distribution of extinct species. Usually, the thickness of the enamel shows what species the remains belong to and what lifestyle it had. This method is over a hundred years old, but mainly manual methods are used for measurement. A relatively new approach in this direction is to measure the thickness of enamel in different sections of the tooth. To do this, it is necessary to "cut" the tooth, but this destroys paleontological material. Dentists from RUDN University suggested that paleontologists use non-destructive medical scanning methods for research. They allow getting a more accurate picture without damaging the tooth itself.
"The interest in methods for measuring the thickness of tooth enamel is related to the importance of these data in evolutionary studies. At the same time, advances in imaging and scanning techniques have made it possible to study the inner layers of teeth with greater precision and detail. This forces a change in established views in various areas of dental research, ranging from the interpretation of morphology to metric assessments. A significant amount of data was obtained using traditional methods, which now need to be critically reviewed with modern technologies and methodology," said Armen Gaboutchian, a reseracher at the Institute of Digital Dentistry, RUDN University.
Doctors demonstrated the possibilities using the example of primate teeth found in northern Vietnam. One of them belonged to the ape Gigantopithecus, the second to an orangutan. The teeth were scanned using a microfocus computed tomography. After receiving the "raw" tomograph data, it needs to be processed and turned into readable and useful for a given purpose.
After processing the tomography results, three-dimensional models are obtained, indicating the thickness of the enamel by a color map. It is also possible to construct two-dimensional sections of the tooth and examine changes in enamel thickness along a selected line. For this purpose, RUDN dentists have developed special software.
"Our approach enables objective and reproducible studies of enamel thickness using automated methods. This is likely to be useful for deeper taxonomic studies and for the development of metric and analytical systems. Moreover, our technique opens up opportunities for its use in clinical methods - to identify changes in the masticatory system. However, this will likely require improvements in clinically applicable imaging methods," Armen Gaboutchian, a researcher at the Institute of Digital Dentistry, RUDN University.
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