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Sandia handheld instrument assesses dental disease in minutes
Who would have guessed that when the Star Trek medical diagnostic tool known as the tricorder makes its appearance in real life, the first user might be . . . your dentist.
According to a paper in the March 27 issue of PNAS (the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences), a recently completed pilot study conducted with the University of Michigan shows that a Sandia National Laboratories handheld device determined in minutes — from a tiny sample of saliva alone — not only if a patient has gum disease but quantitatively how advanced the disease is.
“The gold standard for any medical test is when instruments are used to examine human patients,” says Sandia researcher Amy Herr. “The pilot study allowed us to compare our results to accepted clinical measurements. Then we could statistically validate both the periodontal disease biomarker and the new microfluidic instrument.
“We achieved faster and more reproducible results because we combined steps that ordinarily require time-consuming manual handling by many people, into a single automated device.”
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