IntraOral Scanning in dental Caries

Caries disease is a global health and economy burden experienced by 2 billion of adults and 500 millions of children around the world.

Visual exam and dental radiography are the standard methods for diagnosing and monitoring dental caries and present shortcomings: subtle lesions of caries cannot be visual or radiographically detected and are highly sensitive to the examiner; besides it, X-rays involve ionizing radiation which limits monitoring at small intervals and has structures superimposition.

Recently, TRIOS 4 (3Shape, Copenhagen, Denmark) intraoral scanning (IOS) brings caries aid monitoring tool based on fluorescence and infrared technologies.

Despite in vitro studies suggesting its applicability, there is no clinical evidence of its accuracy (true positives and negatives).

In this context, the goal of this project is to clinically assess the accuracy of this novel approach for detecting and monitoring dental caries.

After ethics approval, I will examine patient’s teeth under dental caries treatment in Faculty of Dental Surgery of University of Malta using visual exam and dental radiography, then I will scan teeth with TRIOS 4 IOS using fluorescence and infrared technologies.

Using these clinical digital data, I will output: 1) the accuracy of TRIOS4 compared with standard methods; 2) if the result changes between professionals - in a multicentre approach.

If firmly established, it will be a way to change caries monitoring in a safe and non-invasive approach; if not, it will provide scientific evidence for improvement, future studies and development of new tools.

The results will be interesting for scientist, dentists, industry and citizens, as caries is a common disease with high global prevalence.

For reaching such audience, communication, dissemination and exploitation is planned using open access practices through data repository, green and gold routes, as well as in mass media.