An intraoral scanner is an optical instrument pointed at the wettest surface in medicine. A film of saliva, a bead of blood at the margin, a breath of fog on the tip — each is invisible on the monitor and quietly fatal to the fit....
An intraoral scanner is an optical instrument pointed at the wettest surface in medicine. A film of saliva, a bead of blood at the margin, a breath of fog on the tip — each is invisible on the monitor and quietly fatal to the fit....
A cone-beam scanner will give you the dose you ask of it, and it never asks whether you needed that much. A Diagnostic Reference Level is the first honest answer to a question most practices never pose: compared with everyone else doing this exact exam,...
A face scan knows the smile but not the bone. A CBCT knows the bone but not the skin. An intraoral scan knows the teeth to the micron but nothing above the gumline. Fuse all three into one aligned 3D record and you have something...
Low dose means a noisy scan. A new class of deep-learning reconstruction rebuilds a clean, diagnostic cone-beam image from a fraction of the radiation — and asks us to read a picture the algorithm partly inferred....
A periapical radiograph flattens a three-dimensional mouth onto a single plane. The tube-shift rule — Same Lingual, Opposite Buccal — is the century-old craft of recovering the depth that projection quietly erased....
A malignancy can hide in mucosa that still looks pink and healthy to the eye. Tissue autofluorescence answers the question a clinical portrait cannot: bathe the mucosa in blue light, and healthy tissue glows back a soft green while trouble goes dark. Here is the...
For a century the dental image has lived behind glass—on film, on a lightbox, on a monitor. Augmented reality proposes something stranger and older: to lift the scan off the screen and hang it, weightless and registered, inside the patient's own head....
A black contrastor does more than tidy the frame. It removes the mouth from the picture so the tooth can finally be seen for what it is: a translucent object of light....
A radiograph is nearly blind to a hairline fracture that runs with the light rather than across the beam. Transillumination answers the question a flat X-ray cannot: shine light through the tooth, and the crack reveals itself. Here is the craft of capturing it....