Colour Assessment in Dentistry

The colour of teeth is of considerable importance to the general population and the social and psychological impact of tooth discolouration is becoming increasingly less tolerated. A plethora of tooth-whitening systems (both for professional use and for use in the home) are now available and methods to assess the efficacy of such systems are required. In this paper an imaging system is described that can take reproducible images of patients’ teeth and methods are described for the colorimetric analysis of these images. The results of a clinical trial indicate that the imaging system that has been developed is effective for the clinical evaluation of tooth whiteness.