Detection and diagnosis of carious lesions: Factual clinical approaches

Minimal intervention dentistry is the accepted contemporary approach for caries management -both for the disease and the lesion. The development of adjunctive technologies to assist early lesion detection and quantifcation has led to the marketing of various devices over the past two decades. A thorough understanding of the clinical relevance of these devices is important to make precise interpretation of the information provided by the individual technologies. In this chapter, we will describe and discuss the most common commercially available carious lesion detection technologies in order to give dental practitioners clear information about the technology details and reliable and reproducible use of each device, its advantages and limitations, using a clinical approach.