Hi, my name is Alex DaSilva. I'm the Director of Headache and Orofacial Pain Effort lab at University of Michigan in School of Dentistry. I'm a dentist and during my training back in Brazil, I noticed that was quite easy to address pain that was acute related to dental treatment, but there was a kind of pain that was very hard for us to address to help the patient, and that was fluoric pain. Now that includes several kinds of pain disorders, including neuropathic pain, head and neck pain, or pain related to saturate. Sometimes patients would still have pain even months after the treatment. So, those kinds of patients were the ones that are very hard to deal with to provide pain relief. So, that was my passion. It's really to make pain something more objective. So, try to understand that they are to chew instead of just asked from zero to 10. From zero's no pain, ten's the worst pain. How can it be more of objective? How can we figure out a way to better measure pain and also better treat pain? My research component was exactly what I wanted for the beginning. How can it be objective about pain? So, I decided to get into new imaging, meaning reading the brain of our patients, go straight to their brains and look if they are in pain or not instead of just asking. So, I started to work in with functional MRIs, meaning looking at the activation in the brain for those patients during pain. Then we decided to look at molecular level, receptor level, seeing with Positron Emission Tomography how, for example, our pain killers are released in the brain of those patients during the attack. Not only that, if you precisely can see the areas in the brain that are affected by fluoric pain, can we target those areas? So, we start to also working with brain stimulation. So, we target those area to provide relief for those patients. We did it with patients with neuropathic pain, fibromyalgia, and the start to use technology to better help those patients. This is a good example. This is the brain of a patient from one of our studies, a migraine patient, and we scale the brain of the patient using Positron Emission Tomography. This is the brain of a patient's data. During the attack, the patient has a headache,migraine and vomiting, and what you're seeing in red is actually the areas where there is a release of our own pain killers in the brain. Now, using this virtual reality, we can navigate through the brain of the patient and better understand what happens in the brain of those patients during migraine attack? Why is this important? Because now we know areas that we can target using brain stimulation for example, and provide a relief to those patients, recruiting resources from their own brains, so decreasing pain to those patients. The next step is bringing all this technology, we got imaging rays stimulation to the clinical environment. For example, we can use now our mental reality and their imagery, that we can in real time see the brain of those patients as we interact with them. Then we can see what's going on, if they are feeling pain, decoding the activation, what's going on their brains, and take decisions about that. That's why it's called augmented reality. We have much more information about crucial information about the patients, and this is technology. This is the standardized that is used in dentistry science. At the very ends, provide a better care to all patients with pain.
