Research database

Oral diseases afflict nearly 3.5 billion people worldwide, untreated caries in permanent teeth affect 2.4 billion people, and more than 530 million children suffer from caries of primary teeth. Oral diseases represent one of the most prevalent health conditions worldwide, affecting people throughout their lifetime, with impacts on life quality, pain, anxiety, functional constraints, and even death. Dental conservative restoration is an approach currently widely used in dentistry, which allows to minimize the surgical intervention while trying to maximize the healing potential of human tissues. This new branch of dentistry strongly relies on novel materials able to repair or substitute damaged teeth and on innovative measurement techniques to assess the health conditions of the analyzed parts of the oral cavity. This project aims at combining the expertise coming from the two research groups (Politecnico di Torino -Italy and University of Illinois, Chicago-USA), in order to address this challenging field of biomedical engineering. The approach will be based on a twofold strategy: new materials will be produced and optimized for use in dentistry applications, then innovative measurement protocols will be developed to assess non-invasively the health conditions of oral cavity tissues. The project will be devoted to: - Materials for dental prosthesis - Materials to enhance enamel remineralization - Measurements to monitor teeth demineralization - Measurements to detect dental caries. The two research groups will rely also on the already existing collaboration with researchers from the Surgical Science Department at the University of Turin. The results obtained during the project will be shared with the scientific community belonging to different fields: Materials Engineering, Measurement Science, and Surgical Science. The outcomes will be beneficial for many fields of expertise, maximizing the possibility of advancement for the branch of restorative dentistry.