Welding in dentistry: SPbU students
At the SPbU Start-Up – 2018, the DENT team is working on an e-dental extractor that is a technology that has no equals on the market and will enable the dentists to extract the fragments of broken files from the canals by contact cold welding.
Modern dentistry is more about preventive care and aims to maintain your natural teeth for life. Yet patients who don't go to the dentist regularly risk getting cavities or even more series pathologies that involve root canal treatment to remove infected tissues.
Although dentists have a wide range of tools and technologies for dental treatment, the files can break and remain in the root canal. Among the causes are the structure of the roots, metal fatigue, or manufacturing faults. The students have come up with an idea as to how to remove the broken files from the root canals.
“Dentists encounter some problems in extracting the broken files from the root canals. We are negotiating with the dentists from the public and private clinics, discuss what drawbacks they see in the current procedures of extracting the broken files and what solution they would like to get. We have preliminary agreements with six clinics that will buy our product”, — said the leader of the team Mikhail Kozyrev.
“The author of the idea is Aleksandr Tsyganov, an expert in physics. It is incredibly interesting to work with his team, — said the scientific supervisor of the project, Head of the Department of Dentistry at SPbU Natalia Sokolovich. — Physicists and mathematicians came up with the idea, but they don’t know the anatomy and physiology of the tooth and tissues and how the endodontic tools work. These medical aspects are on me and my students”.
The extractor involves an e-unit, a wire, fittings for an electrode, and an extracting electrode. The electrode is inserted into the tooth canal until it touches the fragments of the broken file and produces a signal. Then the dentist presses the pedal and performs cold welding. It is no longer than three milliseconds that can prevent tissues from overheating.
The extractor has a number of advantages: you don’t have to remove much of dental tissues; as it is elastic and durable, it is highly unlikely to break in the tooth canals; and it is intuitive to use so you don’t have to gain additional qualification.
The DENT team consists of four students: Mikhail Kozyrev (Dentistry) who is responsible for clinical trials and selecting optimal parameters for exploitation; Elizaveta Bychkova (Dentistry) who studies whether the extractor is safe to use; German Kochnev (Physics) who is responsible for manufacturing; Petr Kozyrev (Biology) who is responsible for business plan and negotiating with the potential customers. The supervisor of the team is Professor and Doctor of Medical Sciences Natalia Sokolovich who is also Head of the Department of Dentistry at SPbU.