The tooth consists of hard tooth tissues (enamel, dentine and cement) and the soft part – a pulp containing tooth nerve and blood vessels. Currently, the viability of the pulp is determined by dentists based on the way the nerve response to the stimulus. This method of investigation is invasive, painful and subjective. Therefore, the aim is to create a viability test for a pulp that would look at the state of the blood vessels and not the nerves, would be non-invasive, painless, easy to use, inexpensive and accurate.
The pulse oximeter is used for a completely objective study, which determines the oxygen saturation of the blood and assesses the blood flow. The device is often used in medicine during general anaesthesia. The pulse oximeter used for dentistry could help determine the viability of the tissue of the pulp and the need for treatment. Unfortunately, there is currently no such device specifically for dentistry in the market.
In the blood, haemoglobin that is saturated with oxygen and not saturated with oxygen is of different colours, and therefore absorbs different amounts of red (660 nm) and infrared light (940 nm). The diodes in the pulse oximeter probe emit red and infrared rays that pass through the pulp blood vessels till they reach the diode-detector. In this way, the oxygen uptake of the blood is determined and the data are displayed in a form of a graph on the screen of the pulse oximeter. In order to avoid inaccuracies and distortions of the rays, parallelism between the light emitting diode and the diode-detector must be maintained.
The holder is designed for used for all teeth groups, since the principle of the slider makes it possible to measure the teeth of any size, while maintaining the parallelism between the two diodes at the ends of the probe. This helps to get results that are more accurate. A comfortable handle makes it possible to hold the pulse oximeter firmly and stably on the tooth. You can then measure the oxygen saturation in the tooth pulp more accurately. If blood flow decreases, oxygen saturation decreases, too. Therefore, based on the data obtained, the viability of the tooth and the need for treatment can be estimated.
Duration:
2018 - 2018
