Month: October 2025

Broader Evaluation of TMD Treatment Efficacy and Response (BETTER TMD) Project Aims to Improve Diagnosis and Treatment of Temporomandibular Disorders Led by Principal Investigators Jianfu Chen and Glenn Clark, the Broader Evaluation of TMD Treatment Efficacy & Response (BETTER-TMD) project, part of the C-TMD IMPACT initiative, seeks to address the challenges of misdiagnosis and suboptimal treatment decisions in temporomandibular disorders (TMDs). The project’s goal is to predict which existing treatments are most effective for individual patients by considering both clinical and psychosocial factors. Using the custom MyDocNote app, researchers will collect real-world, patient-reported treatment outcomes and pair them with de-identified clinical data on signs, symptoms, and diagnoses. Building on preliminary studies from over 1,000 USC TMD-OFP clinic patients, the project will expand data collection to 19 sites nationwide—four university medical centers and fifteen private practices—aiming to gather information from up to 5,000 patients over five years. BETTER-TMD will establish common data elements, develop a large longitudinal database, and apply machine learning to enhance diagnostic accuracy and personalize treatment decisions. The resulting algorithms and datasets will be shared through the FaceBase Hub, paving the way for data-driven, real-time clinical decision support tools to improve TMD care.