MATHEMATICAL MODELING FOR THE PREDICTION AND IMPROVEMENT OF TOOTH THERMAL PAIN: A REVIEW

Abstract

Tooth pain, especially tooth thermal pain, is one of the most important symptoms and signs in dental clinic and daily life. As a special sensation, pain has been studied extensively in both clinic and experimental research aimed at reducing or eliminating the possible negative effects of pain. Unfortunately, the full underlying mechanism of pain is still unclear, because the pain could be influenced by many factors, including physiological, psychological, physical, chemical, and biological factors and so on. Besides, most studies on pain mechanisms in the literature are based on skin pain sensation and only few are based on tooth pain. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review on both neurophysiology of tooth pain mechanism, and corresponding thermal, mechanical, and thermomechanical behaviors of teeth. We also describe a multiscale modeling approach for quantifying tooth thermal pain by integrating the mathematic methods of engineering into the neuroscience. The mathematical model of tooth thermal pain will enable better understanding of thermal pain mechanism and optimization of existing diagnosis and treatment in dental clinic.