Intraoral Tooth Scanner

Transcript of this video:

As so often happens in dentistry, thing have moved on in terms of technology. Today, I’d like to introduce you to the intra-oral scanner.

One of the concerns we have with silicon impressions is there’s always the potential for an element of distortion. When we take an impression of one or several teeth, it’s likely that there will be a small distortion when the silicon sets. We then send that silicon impression to the laboratory, where it’s cast off in a model stone. This is a longstanding practice that we’ve been doing for decades. Again, when the model is cast, there’s a chance there will be a distortion. This can have a knock-on effect when it comes to making crowns to fit on these teeth.

Crowns nowadays are made by robots, rather than by hand. It’s a smoothly running system that works very well, but only if you give it the right information in the first place. With some distortion in the impression and model stages, the crowns may not be exactly the right design for the tooth. But things are changing.

We recently trialled this intra-oral scanner, which is much better, much smaller, and much faster than our traditional impression process. Best of all, we’re finding fantastic results in terms of accuracy. It’s truly a game changer, and our patients are seeing excellent results with it.

Essentially, it’s a very clever camera, and it takes seventy frames per second of very high-quality digital images. And as you move around the arch or the mouth, it takes hundreds of photographs from many angles. Then, it recognises the frame before and the frame after and stitches them together to create a 3-dimensional image. The crowns we’re receiving now fit so much better than anything we’ve had before. It’s an exciting part of the march forward in technology.

If you have any questions, feel free to drop me an email. You can contact me either through the website or direct at ray@mcnamara.co.uk