Technologies
Dental
Periodontal disease is one of the major reasons for tooth loss in the United States and may be associated with systemic effects, including heart disease and rheumatoid arthritis. Although tooth retention has greatly improved over the past few decades, a significant percentage of older Americans do not have functional dentitions and only 42.4% of the U.S.
There are a number of options for the replacement of missing teeth. Dental implants and implant-supported bridges are available as permanent solutions and removable dentures and dental bridges are common non-surgical treatment options. Implants have the benefit of strength and durability and can be used along with bridges or independently. They also generally do not necessitate any alterantion to the shape of the surrounding teeth. It has been shown that people with implants eat better and are healthier and enjoy life more than people with dentures.
Dental training involving patients is not practical for the novice student. The advent of virtual reality based techniques opens up new avenues in medical education. Virtual reality (VR) based training methods are highly cost effective, can be carried out a number of times and have the additional benefits of being able to record and evaluate performance with real-time feedback. With over 8000 students needing training annually in the US alone there is a need for an educational aid that addresses these goals.
In the United States, 2.5 million orthopedic and plastic reconstructions, including bone, cartilage, tendon, ligament, and breast, are performed annually. Most bone repair procedures require a replacement structure to restore tissue function, including total substitutes (artificial joints), or tissue harvested from a second anatomic location of the same patient or from other patients and transplanted to the compromised area.
Modern dentistry focuses on three segments of care: preventive measures, corrective procedures, and restorative treatments. Restorative treatments deal with the restoration of diseased, injured, or abnormal teeth to normal function. It includes all aspects of Endodontics, Periodontics and Prosthodontics. The practice involves combining the traditional techniques of dental arts with scientific (physical, chemical and biological) advances in materials and equipment. Advances in the practice of Dentistry, and in the materials used, have been significant in the last few decades.
This software makes possible real-time, remote, dynamic transmission of fluoroscopic medical imaging sessions. Using standard MPEG video compression, a patient's medical images are transmitted in real time using a broadband Internet connection in a best-effort format. The transmitting computer, equipped with a video-encoding card and custom developed software is located in a remote hospital x-ray suite and is connected to a fluoroscope.