Evaluation of marginal alveolar bone in the anterior mandible with pretreatment and posttreatment computed tomography in nonextraction patients.

INTRODUCTION: Our objectives were to evaluate marginal alveolar bone height in the anterior mandible after orthodontic treatment and to assess any correlations between morphologic and treatment changes. METHODS: We used 57 pretreatment and posttreatment cone-beam computed tomography images (17 male and 40 female subjects; 22 Class I, 35 Class II; average age, 18.7 ± 10.8 years; average treatment time, 22.7 ± 7.3 months) to measure cortical bone thickness, ridge thickness, distance from the apex to the labial cortical bone, and the distance from the cementoenamel junction to the marginal bone crest. Changes in the cementoenamel junction to the marginal bone crest distance were correlated with pretreatment measurements and treatment changes. RESULTS: Although there were great variations, the average facial and lingual vertical bone losses were 1.16 ± 2.26 and 1.33 ± 2.50 mm, respectively. The incisor-mandibular plane angle changes were also highly variable, averaging 2.4°. CONCLUSIONS: Orthodontic treatment causes changes in alveolar bone height and cortical bone thickness around the mandibular incisors. Although pretreatment cortical bone thickness, ridge width thickness, and specific tooth movements all play roles in what happens to the bone during treatment, incisor inclination was not correlated with alveolar bone height changes.

Flexible opto-electronics enabled microfluidics systems with cloud connectivity for point-of-care micronutrient analysis.

In developing countries, the deployment of medical diagnostic technologies remains a challenge because of infrastructural limitations (e.g. refrigeration, electricity), and paucity of health professionals, distribution centers and transportation systems. Here we demonstrate the technical development and clinical testing of a novel electronics enabled microfluidic paper-based analytical device (EE-µPAD) for quantitative measurement of micronutrient concentrations in decentralized, resource-limited settings. The system performs immune-detection using paper-based microfluidics, instrumented with flexible electronics and optoelectronic sensors in a mechanically robust, ultrathin format comparable in size to a credit card. Autonomous self-calibration, plasma separation, flow monitoring, timing and data storage enable multiple devices to be run simultaneously. Measurements are wirelessly transferred to a mobile phone application that geo-tags the data and transmits it to a remote server for real time tracking of micronutrient deficiencies. Clinical tests of micronutrient levels from whole blood samples (n=95) show comparable sensitivity and specificity to ELISA-based tests. These results demonstrate instantaneous acquisition and global aggregation of diagnostics data using a fully integrated point of care system that will enable rapid and distributed surveillance of disease prevalence and geographical progression.