Mechanics behind 4D interferometric measurement of biofilm mediated tooth decay

Evaluating the efficacy of dental materials to protect human teeth requires the capacity to measure tooth decay. Currently, practices for determining tooth decay are destructive, qualitative to lowly quantitative, and/or measure bulk changes that have low to no spatial resolution. The combination of the highly variable nature of tooth enamel and the inability to perform serial analyses on the same spatial location limits the capacity to access reproducible information from any experimental set. To help complement the void left by other techniques, this study explores the potential of interferometric optical profilometry to make rapid precision measurements in 3- dimensions over time of human tooth enamel decay. Using unique techniques in raw interferometric data evaluation in combination with specially designed biocompatible 3-D alignment translation stages, human tooth decay was measured with respect to pathogenic dental bacterial biofilms. These investigations revealed the capacity to quantitatively determine the rate of tooth decay in previously unseen spatial and temporal scales (4D). These new, rapid, low-cost techniques minimize effort for sample preparation and use very few consumables, opening the feasibility for high-throughput investigations of clinical dental materials to a wider international community.