Dental Lab Products Tech Guide 2008 - (Page 9) techtomorrow DISEASE DETECTION A MATTER OF LIGHT AND BREATH New technology detects disease as you exhale By Pam Johnson Photography by Allen Birnbach Harnessing the interaction of light and matter using ultrafast laser light appears not to be a topic relevant to dentistry, but physicist Jun Ye, who leads the AMO Physics and Precision Measurement research group at JILA (see ”What is JILA?” page 10) at the University of Colorado in Boulder has discovered a technique that may have far-reaching diagnostic possibilities for medicine, the field of dentistry, and beyond. By blasting a person’s breath with laser light, molecules that may be biomarkers for disease can be detected simultaneously. This discovery was not the main focus of Ye’s research group, which has been working on developing the next generation of atomic clocks where the tick of the clock is represented by the waves of stable laser light. However, finding such a practical application as a result of ongoing fundamental research pleases Ye. This discovery may someday allow doctors, and even dentists, to screen and monitor patients in real time for a variety of diseases by simply and non-invasively sampling their breath. JILA physicist Jun Ye (left) and Michael Thorpe, University of Colorado-Boulder physics doctoral student, demonstrate the power of lasers in detecting biomarkers for disease. Power of laser light Ye’s technique uses different frequencies of infrared laser light to identify trace levels of different molecules at the same time. Because different molecules absorb light at specific frequencies, it is possible to establish a pattern of light frequencies that form a ”signature” marker for identifying what those molecules are dentallabproducts techguide2008 9
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