Using a dental scanner on corals like a “magic wand”
<p>Dr Kate Quigley’s trip to the dentist might have revolutionised coral reef research.</p>
<p>The intra-oral dental scanner her dentist was using turned out to be the perfect thing for scanning baby corals and learning critical information about their growth.</p>
<p>“Baby corals and teeth are actually not too different. They’re both wet,” says Quigley, now a senior research scientist at the Minderoo Foundation.</p>
<p>“Which might not seem like a big deal – but if you’re scanning something, that creates diffraction. […] Having tech that can work in a wet environment and handle a texture that’s wet, is actually really important.”</p>
<p>There are a few other things that bring dental scanners and coral together, too.</p>
<p>“The properties of teeth and baby coral skeletons are very similar. They’re calcium-based, slightly different, but similar enough that the resolution of the laser was tailored to coral skeletons, just by accident,” says Quigley.</p>
<p>While conducting research at the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) and James Cook University, Quigley managed to get one of the tooth-scanning devices she’d seen at the dentist (the ITero Element 5D Flex), and test it on corals.</p>
<p>Quigley has published a description of the new method in Methods in Ecology and Evolution.</p>
<p>Monitoring coral growth is key to restoring and preserving it.</p>
<p>“Growth and survival are really the currency of any monitoring program. It doesn’t matter what organism you’re looking at,” says Quigley.</p>
<p>But it’s very difficult to monitor the growth of corals – because of their shape and size.</p>
<p>“How most coral growth studies are done is really just taking 2D flat images. And that works really well when the coral is really young, say a month or two months, because they’re like little flat pancakes,” says Quigley.</p>
<p>As they grow, corals develop very complex three-dimensional structures. Scanning these structures is time-consuming, and often destructive: the coral has to be killed in order to be scanned.</p>
<p>The dental scanner takes quick, harmless scans and uses AI to combine the images into a 3D picture almost immediately.</p>
<p>“Instead of taking all day and into the night, it takes two minutes,” says Quigley.</p>
<p>It also provides better detail.</p>
<p>“Baby corals start off really small. They’re almost invisible,” says Quigley.</p>
<p>“Being able to measure those really fine scale differences, smaller than a millimetre, was also really important.”</p>
<p>Quigley describes the scanner as “effectively a magic wand”.</p>
<p>So far, the scanner’s been shown to work in a lab (at AIMS National Sea Simulator) and in the field – on a boat above the water.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, it’s not waterproof enough to take diving. Yet.</p>
<p>Quigley hopes it will become a regular tool used by coral researchers and restorers.</p>
<p>“If we are thinking about scaling up reef restoration in the future we’re going to need a way to measure and monitor these individuals more effectively. It wouldn’t be sustainable if it’s one individual a day.”</p>
<p>Quigley says that this discovery demonstrates the importance of thinking laterally.</p>
<p>“In science I feel like there’s less and less room to just be creative anymore,” she says.</p>
<p>“This has been a really interesting time for me – to dabble in dentistry and look at all the tech that’s available and may be useful in conservation.”</p>
<p><strong>This article originally appeared on <a href="https://cosmosmagazine.com/nature/coral-dental-scanner/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">cosmosmagazine.com</a> and was written by Ellen Phiddian.</strong></p>
<p><em>Images: Shutterstock</em></p>
