Scalable dental computing on cyberinfrastructure

Dentistry is a particularly complex and sophisticated applied science; many problems have to be solved by analyzing intensive longitudinal data. For example, dynamic carious lesion assessment requires dental researchers to perform knowledge discovery in a situation with multiple specimens across different experimental phases. The technological development and availability of cyberinfrastructure today can enable dental researchers to perform existing procedures far faster and more accurately than ever. This paper uses dynamic carious lesion activity assessment as a case study, to illustrate how visual computing on advanced cyberinfrastructure can expand beyond statistical number crunching and information retrieval to make an imaginative and creative contribution to some aspects of dental science. Our work focuses on the generation of BIG pictures on cyberinfrastructure and the presentation of derived dental structures in an interactive means, which combine to allow researchers to navigate from observation to qualitative discovery and then to quantitative assessment with multiple variables and degrees of freedom. Our work has seen early use by our collaborators in oral health research, where our system has been used to pose and answer domain-specific questions for quantitative assessment of dynamic carious lesion activities.