diagnostics Article In Vivo Endoscopic Optical Coherence Tomography of the Healthy Human Oral Mucosa: Qualitative and Quantitative Image Analysis Marius Albrecht 1, Christian Schnabel 1,2, Juliane Mueller 2, Jonas Golde 2 , Edmund Koch 2 and Julia Walther 1,∗ 1 Department of Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering, Technische Universitaet Dresden, Carl Gustav Carus Faculty of Medicine, Fetscherstraße 74, 01307 Dresden, Germany;
[email protected] (M.A.);
[email protected] (C.S.) 2 Department of Anesthesiology and Intensive Care Medicine, Technische Universität Dresden, Clinical Sensoring and Monitoring, Carl Gustav Carus Faculty of Medicine, Fetscherstraße 74, 01307 Dresden, Germany;
[email protected] (J.M.);
[email protected] (J.G.);
[email protected] (E.K.) * Correspondence:
[email protected]; Tel.: +49-351-458-6132 Received: 14 September 2020; Accepted: 10 October 2020; Published: 15 October 2020 Abstract: To date, there is still a lack of reliable imaging modalities to improve the quality of consultation, diagnostic and medical examinations of the oral mucosa in dentistry. Even though, optical technologies have become an important element for the detection and treatment of different diseases of soft tissue, for the case of oral screenings the evidence of the benefit in comparison to conventional histopathology is mostly still pending. One promising optical technology for oral diagnostics is optical coherence tomography (OCT). To prove the potential of OCT, even the amount of freely accessible OCT data is not sufficient to describe the variance of healthy human oral soft tissue in vivo. In order to remedy this deficiency, the present study provides in vivo OCT cross sections of the human oral mucosa of the anterior and posterior oral cavity as well as the oropharynx of 47 adult volunteers.