An improved electric pulp tester

The vitality of dental pulp is for important routine diagnosis and for treatment of tooth inflammation and necrosis. To determine the pulp vitality of a tooth, many techniques have been adopted by clinicians, such as radiographic examination, tooth plethysmography, and electric pulp testing (EPT). With regard to cost, effectiveness, and degrees of invasiveness, EPT has become the most useful and important diagnostic aid for evaluating pulp vitality. In this study, the authors investigated a commercial EPT system, to which feedback control was applied. The modified system, using a notebook computer to derive the feedback function, improved the operation of the commercial pulp tester. This system allowed the authors to re-evaluate the effectiveness of the pulp tester, and allowed them to determine how the system becomes more robust to threshold current.