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When you hear the word dentist, what word immediately comes to your mind?

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Pain.

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Unfortunately, pain and dentistry have always been synonymous with each other.

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Throughout history, dentists and engineers have attempted to make dentistry more comfortable

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by making tools and equipment more patient-friendly.

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Now, NASA and its research partners have made pain-free dentistry a reality.

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Jennifer Cortes examines how a new dental instrument, which was originally designed at NASA,

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will finally make a trip to the dentist a painless experience.

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Have you ever had this experience at your dentist?

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It seems most people do not like to visit their dentist regularly.

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Why? Pain.

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To some people, the sight of dental instruments often invokes feelings of anguish and fear.

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In fact, most dental instruments are not pleasing to the eye or to your mouth.

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Until now.

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NASA and its partners have developed an instrument that will help keep periodontal disease,

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which is the leading cause of tooth loss in adults, in check.

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This technology was originally designed to help detect cracks in airplanes,

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but is now currently being used to design and manufacture a revolutionary dental instrument

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called the Ultrasonographic Periodontal Probe.

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The technology that's in the probe is ultrasonics.

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These are the sound waves that we use to probe inside materials, such as the aircraft wings.

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Ultrasonics is very high-frequency sound.

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We at NASA use high-frequency sound to actually look inside materials.

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We like to be able to assess the health of a material,

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just like a physician would assess the health of a person.

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When you look with ultrasound inside a material, you can find defects.

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Defects such as internal damage.

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Defects such as corrosion that would lead to a loss of strength of a material

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that might cause a mission failure.

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Now, how did you discover the specific problems that the probe solves?

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The specific problem was actually discovered while we were trying to assess the integrity of aircraft.

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Ultrasonics could characterize the desponds and microcracking that occurred near rivets on aircraft.

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That same ultrasonics could be used to find desponds between the teeth and the gums.

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In other words, periodontal disease.

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Periodontal disease is an infection of the tissues that help anchor your teeth.

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If left untreated, it can lead to tooth and bone loss.

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Currently, the most widely performed method to measure periodontal disease is not the most comfortable.

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It involves the insertion of a small, blunt probe between your tooth and gum

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to measure the depth of the periodontal pocket.

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This process is highly invasive, uncomfortable, and inconsistent.

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This new instrument, developed by NASA Langley and its partners,

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uses ultrasonic sound waves that interact with your teeth and map the periodontal pocket.

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NASA works very closely with medical people during the technology transfer

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that allows us to take what we have learned in studying materials

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and apply it to materials that are human tissue.

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We've had many people contribute to its success.

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One of those individuals is John Companion.

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John worked at NASA Langley Research Center for 27 years

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and now works in the Applied Science Department at the College of William and Mary.

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We met up with John at the Dental Hygiene Research Center at Old Dominion University.

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The new probe simply touches the surface of the gum and slides along,

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and the only coupling between the gum and the probe is just water.

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So it's totally non-invasive, doesn't hurt at all, should provide more information

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because of the way the information is gathered, and it should be faster.

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The problem that you have with the current technology is one, obviously, is it's highly invasive,

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and this hurts. Ultrasound doesn't.

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No sensation, no penetration, they simply run it just along the edge of the gum

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and you get a nice little image on the screen of a computer that shows you a map.

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All the information retrieved by the probe can be archived on a computer.

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A physician can then compare real-time data and past data to diagnose the condition of the patient.

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And the nice thing that dentists like about this is they can show the map to the patient

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so he can actually see what's going on in his gum.

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And, of course, if you can evaluate the disease, you can also evaluate the treatment.

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So when they start treating it, you can go back and you can check on it and see,

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is this particular treatment doing any good? Do we need to modify it?

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Do we need to do something different here?

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And because this will all be computerized, you only need one person to do it.

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Right now you have to have one person to take the measurement, one person to write down the measurement.

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There's time savings, there's money savings.

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The patients like it. I liked it.

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I've actually used myself as a guinea pig.

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I've had all three types of probing done by several different dentists now.

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And let me tell you, the ultrasound is the only way to go.

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The use of ultrasound in dental diagnostics provides an alternative approach to conventional probing.

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Patient discomfort and the need for drugs like Novocain are virtually eliminated.

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This technology could eventually touch every person who visits the dentist regularly.