Team:CCU Taiwan

Carindex

Dental Caries

The WHO estimates that nearly all adults will have dental caries at some point, and the actual dental caries rate in Taiwan is 99.2%. Dental caries is easily ignored by patients since they do not hurt until they become serious. In the worst case, treatment requires tooth implantation, a painful and costly procedure. And since dental treatments are counted in Taiwan social welfare expense, they actually cost more than 16 billion NTD per year (>500 million USD), leading to government financial difficulties.


Carindex is here to solve this problem!

Carindex, a system designated to evaluate the risk of dental caries through saliva, is here to solve these problems. Three parameters that correlated with dental caries: lactate level, competence stimulating peptide (CSP) concentration, pH value, will be detected in the engineered E. coli, B. subtilis and test paper, respectively. Then, machine learning will use these values to generate a prediction model. Ultimately, Carindex utilizes this model along with the detection devices to alert users to their risk of dental caries, and raise public awareness of dental caries. Expectedly, Carindex can decrease dental caries rate significantly in Taiwan.