Dentistry has already made the leap into the digital era. We have gone from making impressions of the mouth, models with alginates, silicones, casting with casts… to a digital scanning of the record taking with a scanner. Radiological diagnosis used to be based on conventional radiographs with developed images, but now it has become a digital development, even with the scanners that are already in the clinics on a regular basis. Before you had to go to a radiologist to do a CT scan, now these machines are in most clinics.
What is the technological future of dentistry?
When planning is also digital, it is no longer done on physical models of plaster and waxes, but on computer figures by CAD-CAM. In addition, the elaboration of prosthetic work is already done directly with machines or with digital printers, there is nothing real, it is what we call the digital workflow. In the field of surgery there is also CT surgical planning, in which we can make templates and place those implants exactly where we have planned, according to the prosthesis we have previously devised. It is an immense leap in the field of surgery, since all this progress makes it possible to perform increasingly less invasive, less aggressive surgeries, with much faster healing and less pain.
What does the CAD-CAM system consist of?
CAD-CAM is a technology that emerged in the 1970s. Initially, it was made to work within the automotive and aviation industries, as they were the only ones who could afford this kind of sophistication. From the eighties onwards, things started to become more generalized when many industries started to use it to design all kinds of parts. In dentistry the first beginnings started, some demonstrations were made by making some loose test and began to create what are called digital cameras.
CAD stands for computer-aided design of structures, i.e., we can design any structure inside a computer. But to manufacture it we will need another type of software, which is the CAM type that is computer manufacturing. Through the information obtained in the CAT, we will pass it to the CAM and this will take it to a machine that will be able to carry out this process. What is important and must be taken into account is that before carrying out this process, the information must be transferred to the computer. In dentistry it is a matter of taking the patient’s mouth and transmitting it to a computer to be able to design. For this purpose, there are intraoral scanners that are capable of using a camera to collect the three-dimensional information of a tooth, a mouth or whatever we want and transfer it to a computer so that we can design whatever we want on top of it. Then we can manufacture it through the CAM system.
Intraoral scanner What is it for?
Currently there has been a great boom of intraoral scanners, there are many models and can be applied for many things. One of them is orthodontic studies, such as Invisalign and digital orthodontic projection systems. The mouth is scanned, it can be sent to the Invisalign design center and it will design all the templates to achieve a transformation of a mouth. In this way, we can make small restorations on the teeth from small CAM systems in the clinic itself and immediately. This means that the patient has to visit the dentist fewer times and also allows the specialist to work with better precision.
These samples can also be sent to certain laboratories through digital vehicles, such as the Internet. Once there, they can design and send the prosthesis we want, always digitally. This is what is known today as the digital flow. The jobs are all tried to be done through digital means avoiding using analog means, which depend much more on the human defect or the hands that these can always be much more incorrect.