As time goes on, inventors come up with brilliant ideas that make our lives better and easier. The field of Dentistry is no exception. In case you didn’t know, there is a device created to eliminate the need for gooey, bad tasting impressions in the dental office! It is called a 3-D digital scanner. It has revolutionized the process of taking information from a patients’ mouth, and delivering it to the laboratory so that the restoration or prosthesis (nightguard, retainer, crown, partial denture, etc.) can be fabricated more quickly and accurately.
I am pleased to announce that Tempe Smile Design has purchased our first digital scanner!! It is called the iTero and it is AMAZING!! The information it can collect and transfer is simply incredible. These are a few of the things it can do.
Take a digital image of you entire mouth in place of impression material. That image can be sent electronically to our dental laboratory (all 4 of the laboratories we use can accept digital scans) for use in the fabrication of dental appliances and crown and bridge.
These scans can also be used to send digital impressions directly to Invisalign, for which we are Silver providers, to allow them to create a treatment plan and generate aligners for the orthodontic movement of the teeth. It will register both arches of teeth, and the bite of the patient all with one scan, again, saving a large amount of time and eliminating the need to mail the impressions to them. This greatly speeds up the turnaround time.
The scanner also tracks changes to your teeth over time, such as chewing surface wear, tooth movement, and gum recession by recording and storing them for future comparison. This is an amazing feature, as those are all difficult things to track until the deterioration becomes very noticeable. It will help us to stay ahead of those destructive processes that cause damage to our teeth and gums. And, these records can be stored for 14 years!
The digital scanner IS a big deal!! It is a remarkable tool to help Dentists do an even better job taking care of our patients’ teeth. The improvements in technology becoming available to us continue to impress me. We at Tempe Smile Design try to incorporate the latest technologies to help us provide the best possible treatment. Come see us and check out our new state-of-the-art scanner!