Within their limits, the present data indicate that: (i) The peri-implant soft tissue around titanium and zirconia showed colour differences when compared to the soft tissue around natural teeth, and (ii) the peri-implant soft tissue around zirconia demonstrated a better colour match to the soft tissue at natural teeth than titanium.

The light-correcting device influenced the shade-matching performance; however, the attached polarization filter did not improve the results of the shade matching.

Surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) represents a promising technique in providing specific molecular information that could have a major impact in biomedical applications, such as early cancer detection. SERS requires the presence of a suitable plasmonic substrate that can generate enhanced and reproducible diagnostic relevant spectra. In this paper, we propose a new approach for the synthesis of such a substrate, by using concentrated silver nanoparticles purified using the Tangential Flow Filtration method. The capacity of our substrates to generate reproducible and enhanced Raman signals, in a manner that can allow cancer detection by means of Multivariate Analysis (MVA) of Surface Enhanced Raman (SER) spectra, has been tested on blood plasma samples collected from 35 healthy donors and 29 breast cancer patients. All the spectra were analyzed by a combined Principal Component-Linear Discriminant Analysis. Our results facilitated the discrimination between healthy donors and breast cancer patients with 90% sensitivity, 89% specificity and 89% accuracy. This is a direct consequence of substrates’ ability to generate diagnostic relevant spectral information by performing SERS measurements on pristine blood plasma samples. Our results suggest that this type of solid substrate could be employed for the detection of other types of cancer or other diseases by means of MVA-SERS procedure.

The aim of the study was to assess the effect of staining and bleaching on CAD/CAM materials with high (HT) and low translucency (LT or T). Samples were stored in coffee and subsequently bleached. CIELAB parameters were recorded at baseline, after coffee immersion, after bleaching. Translucency parameter (TP), whiteness index (WID) and color changes were calculated (ΔE00). Influence of staining and bleaching was analyzed with repeated-measures ANOVA and color differences between materials were analyzed with one-way ANOVA (α=0.05). Staining and bleaching significantly affected CIELAB parameters and WID for all materials (p<0.001). TP was significantly influenced by staining and bleaching for Crios and Enamic (p<0.05). Mean color differences were significantly different between materials (p<0.001). The greatest color changes due to staining were observed for Lava Ultimate while the lowest for e.max CAD. Both coffee staining and bleaching induced greater color changes for HT materials of the same brand compared to LT.

Biological effects of low-dose ionizing radiation (IR) have been unclear until now. Saliva, because of the ease of collection, could be valuable in studying low-dose IR effects by means of surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS). The objective of our study was to compare the salivary SER spectra recorded before and after low-dose IR exposure in the case of pediatric patients (PP). Unstimulated saliva was collected from ten PP before and after irradiation with a cone beam computed tomography (CBCT) machine used for diagnostic purposes. The SERS measurements have been recorded on dried saliva samples using a solid nanosilver plasmonic substrate synthesized using an original method developed in our laboratory. The experimental results showed that salivary SER spectra are dominated by three vibrational bands (441,735 and 2107 cm−1) that can be assigned to bending and stretching vibrations of salivary thiocyanate (SCN-). After exposure, an immediate increase of vibrational bands assigned to SCN- has been recorded in the case of all samples, probably as a result of IR interaction with oral cavity. This finding suggests that SCN- could be used as a valuable biomarker for the detection and identification of low-dose radiation effects.