 Johannesburg,
the largest metropolis in the Republic of South Africa
and the predominant commercial center and economic driver
for the country, was the site of the Sixth Annual South
African Dental Association/DENTSPLY Student Clinician
program that took place on September 15.
Mr. Riann Mulder from the University of the Western
Cape was awarded the Top Prize in this year's competition.
His winning presentation was called “Super-absorbent
isolation roll for rural areas.” Mr. Mulder was
also invited to attend the 2005 American Dental Association
Annual Session in Philadelphia in early October as a
VIP guest of the Company.
A Reception and Dinner was conducted that evening at
the Sunnyside Park Hotel in honor of the participants.
The Dinner was hosted by George Rhodes, DENTSPLY Vice
President for Professional Relations, and was attended
by dental luminaries from all areas of the nation.
Honored guests at the Head Table included Dr. and Mrs.
Len Sizani, President of the South African Dental Association;
Mrs. Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge, Deputy Minister of Health
for the Republic of South Africa; Dr. and Mrs. Neil
Campbell, Executive Director of the South African Dental
Association; Professor and Mrs. Paul Lohse, Chairman
of the South African Dental Association Education Committee;
Mr. Richard Markwick, DENTSPLY Business Director for
Middle East/Africa and the Commonwealth of Independent
States; and Mrs. Penny Hardaker, DENTSPLY Marketing
and Training Director for Middle East/Africa and the
Commonwealth of Independent States.
| Imaging
Technique Shows Promise in Detecting Early Signs
of Tooth Decay
March 15, 2006 - When dentists notice teeth
with tiny “white-spot” lesions, or
areas of mildly decalcified enamel, they usually
ask themselves the obvious questions: How
deep is the lesion? Will it progress to full-blown
decay? Or will the lesion remineralize on
its own? The problem is there are no obvious
answers. Currently available dental imaging
technologies cannot provide high enough resolution
to answer any of these questions, and this shortcoming
has led to attempts to adapt powerful industrial
imaging tools to the everyday needs of the dentist’s
office. Among the technologies now under
development is optical coherence tomography, or
OCT. A product of the telecommunications
industry, OCT measures the optical reflection
of low coherence light sources focused on the
tooth enamel. A team of NIDCR grantees has
published a series of papers over the past few
years on OCT imaging of tooth enamel and, in the
March issue of the journal Caries Research,
they provide new data on a variant technique called
polarization-sensitive OCT (PS-OCT). This
technique records spatially resolved changes in
polarized light backscatter from the tooth enamel. Studying
artificial caries on the tooth’s occlusal,
or biting and chewing, surfaces, the scientists
show that PS-OCT has a number of advantages over
conventional OCT. One advantage is an increased
contrast to differentiate between areas of normal
and demineralized enamel. Another is its
more straightforward approach to quantifying caries
lesions, which is more insensitive to the
varied surface topography of the tooth.
To
read more about this paper, click here.
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