Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
I'm here at St Paul, Minnesota, at the 3M Technology Centre,
where we've been discussing the future of dentistry
using next-generation digital technology. And one of the most extraordinary
advances
is the machining of new dental devices,
to replace damaged teeth, or lost teeth, that
have been formed as a result of a continuous video image:
Let me explain: you put a camera inside the mouth.
The camera takes a video as you move the camera around,
and those images are automatically converted into a three-dimensional
structure which you can move around virtually, on the screen, so that you can
see each
tooth in relation to the other teeth. You can see where the gaps are, you can see where the
gums are, you can see how the upper and the lower jaws fit together,
or how they don't. And out of this
3-dimensional image can be built, a replacement structure
for an individual tooth, or a bridge, or whatever. And so within a few minutes
of those images being finished, a file can be sent to another part of the world or
to a specialist laboratory in the next town or city,
and that can then be used to engineer
the structure which would go into that person's mouth.
It saves all kinds of intermediary steps,
a lot of cost and so on. It also saves a rather unpleasant prices
making a traditional mold inside someone's mouth, which many patients don't like
at all.
It's just one example of the way in which
digital technology is enhancing dentistry. But it doesn't stop there.
And it's because it's in parallel with other advances,
in particular nanotechnology, built into composites. Now, what do I mean by that?
In the olden days you could cast a tooth out of porcelain or some other kind of structure
and hope for the best. But these teeth would not look particularly natural. Because
they didn't necessarily reproduce the exact coloring
of the tooth. You could see the join where the tooth was
was bonded to
a piece where the tooth has been broken, where
the translucency was not the same and so on. With new materials,
new composite materials, dentists are able to build up
in layers, replacement chunks,
of a tooth which has just snapped, or other kinds
of teeth replacement. And the results are truly astonishing.
An almost perfect match in terms of translucency,
coloring, texture, a very hard-wearing surface,
which is very unlikely to break.
It can be polished, and so on. And
these kinds of structures are revolutionising cosmetic dentistry
where caps, crowns and goodness knows what have
been the 'name of the day' in the past and have really been comparatively crude.
So watch this space for all kinds of innovation.
And these techniques are also enabling
less experienced dentist to have an almost perfect result.