A hand-held intra-oral dental device and method are described for the detection of pre-caries lesions and the prediction of evolution and prognosis of same. The present invention has as its foundation a low-cost tool for predicting the likelihood of the development of Early Childhood Caries (ECC), in contrast to other techniques and associated devices, where their focus is to identify individual pre-caries lesions. This method focuses on the detection of caries precursors or of their patterns and the relationship of those precursors and patterns to the likelihood of subsequent dental disease. The implications for the establishment for early preventive treatment are profound, namely the earliest implementation of preventative therapy for our approach relative to that of the other approaches.