Lassonde School of Engineering Professor Nima Tabatabaei, from the Department of Mechanical Engineering, has received funding from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR)and Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) to partner with Quantum Dental Technologies (a Canadian diagnostic device company) to develop a dental diagnostic imaging technology.
This research will change the way cavities are detected by doctors, leading to earlier treatment and better oral health.
Tabatabaei's work will focus on the development and clinical translation of a high-resolution photothermal coherence tomography clinical device for detection and 3-D mapping of early dental caries.
The proposed device is expected to show areas of dental demineralization at much earlier stages, meaning when the cavity can still be remineralized or healed, creating a painless, cost-effective and non-invasive treatment for tooth decay instead of the conventional drilling and filling approach.
Over the next three years, $300,000 out of the $717,294 funding will support the operation of this project at Tabatabaei’s Hybrid Biomedical Optics laboratory.
Tabatabaei's research interests are design and development of hybrid biomedical optics imaging technologies for applications in early disease diagnosis and screening. Tabatabaei carried out research for two years at the Harvard Medical School and Wellman Center for Photomedicine as a postdoctoral fellow before joining York University in 2014.