The improvement in the detection of caries offers the possibility for dramatic improvement in dental healthcare. Current caries detection rates suggest that there may be scope for improvement. This paper describes a preliminary study to examine applications of terahertz pulse imaging (TPI) to caries detection. We present results for the detection of early stage caries in the occlusal enamel layer of a range of human tooth cross sections using TPI. Higher attenuation of terahertz radiation was observed in carious enamel as compared with healthy enamel. Hypomineralised enamel had different absorption spectra and contrast compared to carious enamel in TPI images. These results have important implications for extending TPI to other medical imaging applications where both early diagnosis and safety issues are important.
Redox imaging allows measurement of drug responses in lab-grown cancer samplesScientists have developed a nondestructive way of measuring drug treatment responses in lab-grown cancer samples to identify better treatments for each patient, and a particularly powerful approach is to use patientderived cancer organoids, essentially 'tumors-in-adish,' to test drugs before giving them to a patient." Gil notes that a key prerequisite for realizing this idea is finding a way to determine whether or not the organoids are responding to a treatment. Existing methods for making this determination provide limited information about drug effects or require destroying the organoids.A research team including Gil, and directed by Melissa Skala of the Morgridge Institute for Research, therefore aimed to develop an informative, nondestructive way of imaging cancer organoid responses to drug treatments. The researchers chose SUMMARY Scientists at the Morgridge Institute for Research demonstrate that an optical imaging technique called redox imaging can be used to measure how a laboratory-grown tumor model responds to drug treatments. These findings may accelerate drug discovery and the development of precision cancer medicine.
There are unresolved clinical problems that require the provision of accurate 3-D images of tissue structures such as teeth. In particular, measurements of dental enamel thickness are necessary to quantify problems associated with enamel erosion, yet currently there is no nondestructive method to obtain this information. We present a method that relies on the use of pulsed terahertz radiation to gain 3-D information from dental tissues. We discuss results from 14 samples and demonstrate that we can reliably and accurately quantify enamel thickness. We show that in a series of 22 surfaces, we can image pertinent subsurface features 91% of the time. Example images are shown where structures in teeth at depth are rendered accurate to within 10 microm. We discuss issues that arise using this imaging method and propose ways in which it could be used in clinical practice.
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