Caries Research Paper

DISCUSSION

Caries is aninfective disease that presents high incidence from the earliest ages and causes tooth structure loss, damaging the individual’s oral and general health. Typically, when the dentin is taken chance and it is difficult to control biofilm formation on the lesion, it is essential to remove the tissue involved to control the development of the disease (Correa et al., 2007).

During the invasive treatment of caries using high speed instruments, the dental surgeon is forced to destroy the sound tooth structure. The concept of minimally invasive dentistry is based on removing caries with method that minimize the loss of sound enamel and dentin (Allen et al., 2005). Carious dentin is composed of an outer infected layer that

However, it is a time-consuming methodology with unclear aspects, such as the partial volumetric effect (Jan, 2006). Occurring when a single pixel or voxel includes both the structure of interest and the background, this effects results in differences in relation to successive longitudinal scans of the same specimen. As a result of this, in carious teeth specimens with larger cavities will face further suffering from partial volumetric effect in comparison to teeth with smaller cavities (Jorgensen et al., 2008). What is more, owing to the fact that the device is very expensive and limited in terms of availability due to the use of such synchrotron sources, it is not used on a widespread basis (Sidky et al.,

Knoop and Vicker’s microhardness is suitable for determining the hardness of very brittle materials, such as dental hard tissue (Hosoya et al., 2000; Hossain et al., 2003; Correa et al., 2007).

In tooth hardness studies the Vicker indenter is more practical than the Knoop’s in that a square shape has to be forever preserved; and close to the outer surface and the dentinoenamel junction a small tension of the diagonals of the indentations, that cause errors in hardness measurements, is easily determined (Gutierrez-Salazar and Reyes-Gasga, 2003). Therefore in this study, the use of a microhardness tester with a Vicker indenter allowed measuring the hardness of the remaining dentin, as an indicator of treatment effectiveness.

The mean Vicker’s hardness values of the sound dentin (VHN=55,33 in the conventional group and VHN=54,81 in the hand excavation group) in our experiment was close to the traditional Vicker’s hardness values of sound dentin (50-60 VHN) as reported by Fuentes et al. (2003). Statistical analysis did not show significant differences between the two groups for dentin