ABSTRACT
Pediatrics is the part of dentistry that cares about all alterations on hard and soft tissue of children. It involves preventive measures, early diagnosis and treatment of the multitude of oral diseases and conditions found in the child’s and the adolescent’s mouth, including caries, periodontal disease, mineralization disturbances, disturbances in tooth development and tooth eruption, and traumatic injuries. Considering that dealing with children and even teenagers is a great task for dental clinicians, the use of technologies to mitigate impacts arising by the use of invasive tools is very important. This is the case of exploiting photonics. For instance, the use of laser to cavity preparation is more interesting than using the drill. For diagnostics, the use of optical coherence tomography (OCT) is very desirable, even over the use of X-ray, which although non-invasive, uses ionizing radiation and should be avoided anytime possible.
The great reported majority of OCT studies in pediatric dentistry so far focused on the topics of pediatric research applied to dental caries and dental restorations. In this chapter, we shall review the work beyond these two topics to include erosion monitoring evaluation and also periodontal disease. For readers not fully acquainted with the OCT technique, refer to Chapter 2 and references therein.
