Intraoral Scanners – Improving Patient Experience & Care
At Valley Arts Dental in West Orange New Jersey, we are excited to now have an Intraoral Scanner in our office. We aAn Intraoral Scanners (or IOS) is a device used to capture optical impressions for dentistry.
Instead of waiting for various impression materials to set in a patient’s mouth, these scanners can be waved over the teeth of interest, and form an incredibly accurate digital impression of the areas of interest.
Essentially the scanner is waved around the mouth and acts as video camera taking hundreds of optical images of your mouth. These images are then instantly stitched together to fabricate a digital model of your mouth.
These digital models can then be securely and instantaneously sent to on of our lab partners who can begin work immediately on the case.
The benefit to dental patients
Patient Education: Our intraoral scanner instantly creates a digital model of a patient’s teeth that can be zoomed in more than 25x. Additionally software features can demonstrate things such as tooth wear, uneven bite force, orthodontic movements, gum recession, etc. These visual tools provide an invaluable education for patients to better understand their oral heal health
Patient Comfort – Many patients have unfortunately become accustomed to traditional impressions where despite our best efforts, a goopy material in a plastic tray has to set in the mouth for what seems like eternity until it reaches a more rubber-like consistency. These impressions can be uncomfortable, messy, and poor testing. The Intraoral scanner solves all of these issues.
Time saver – An intraoral scan depending on the nature of the treatment and the patient, can be completed in 2 to 4 minutes typically as opposed to 4-10 minutes for traditional impressions. The digital models created from the scan can be instantly sent our lab partners. There is no time wasted shipping physical impressions, and also no risk of these physical impressions getting damaged or lost in transit.
Accurate – As scanners continue to improve their accuracy has finally surpassed that of traditional impressions. The scanner is accurate in the sense of producing and capturing the exact shape and contours of your teeth thus enabling the dentist to give appropriate and accurate treatment.
Environmentally sustainable- Instead of utilizing dozens of plastic trays, disposable impression material mixing tips, and impression material, and shipping that to our lab via a courier service, with our new intraoral scanner, a sterilizable tip is placed on our scanner and the file is digitally sent instantly to our laboratory partners.
Our office will continue to utilize traditional impression material as the scanner is not suitable for all patient cases. The intraoral scanner will however have a wide range of applications in our office, and you will likely see it used in the course of your care at Valley Arts Dental.
Valley Arts Dental in West Orange New Jersey