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June 2009 | Dental Lab Products
Forward Trends: Digital Impressions

Sirona shines a new light on digital impressions

Roddy MacLeod, Senior Director of CAD/CAM for Sirona Dental Systems, details the advanced features of the CEREC Bluecam AC chairside digital impression-capture system and the power of capturing digital oral data.

Michael Augins, President of Sirona, with the new CEREC Bluecam AC

DLP: The new CEREC Bluecam AC chairside unit incorporates a number of blue LEDs to capture intraoral data. What does blue-light LED bring to the intraoral scan?

MacLeod: Dental scanners are all alike in that they use light to measure tooth surfaces. Generally speaking, you collect more data using blue-light technology because its shorter wavelength allows you to capture more data points. The type of tooth surface you are measuring also has an effect on the measuring device. If the light source penetrates the tooth surface, you’re not going to get a precise reading. For that reason, we use a microns-thin layer of opaquer with all our camera systems. It is the most accurate way to measure a translucent object.

When we engineered our AC scanner, we improved the depth of field, we improved the precision of the instrument by using a higher wavelength, we improved a number of algorithms, we improved our calibration technique, and we improved some of our computer processing. What this means to the end user is that a single picture collects enough data to make a restoration that fits.

The CEREC Bluecam AC captures a half-arch in 40 seconds or less, depending on your familiarity with the technology, or two-minute for a full arch. That’s the fastest scanning on the market today.

DLP: What differentiates the Bluecam AC intraoral technology from similar technologies on the market?

MacLeod Other cameras have a shallow depth of field, which means they need to take incremental shots from the buccal, lingual, and different angles to fill in the data they can’t capture in just one shot. All things being equal, doing procedures in the mouth is one of the most difficult areas to work. One of our design and thinking principles is get in and out of the mouth as quickly as possible. It’s better to go in to take one or two shots from the occlusal plane than it is to take six to 12 or 18 from all different angles.

The CEREC Bluecam scan data is sent to the CEREC Connect Web portal where it is retrieved by the laboratory for CAD design and milling or traditional laboratory techniques.

We don’t take as many pictures as a video scanner because we don’t need as many. Something that’s unique to CEREC is its extremely deep depth of field, which gives the user a wide area of vision that’s in focus. This provides extreme flexibility in how you position the capture device in the mouth. You can put the camera right on top of the tooth, or you can hold it up and away from the tooth and take a picture.

DLP: Is there an option for dentists interested in just the digital impression aspect of the CEREC system but prefer to leave the CAD/CAM work to their labs?

MacLeod: Starting in May, the CEREC Bluecam AC is offered separate from the milling unit. Dentists are interested in it because they see it as easier and more precise. We’ve seen a whole industry waiting to divorce themselves from physical impressions.

Laboratories equipped with the Sirona inLab CAD/CAM system now have access to 10,000-plus CEREC chairside owners. That’s an enormous user base of clinicians who would be happy to send cases to a laboratory without any kind of physical impression.

DLP: The data from the CEREC AC will be able to meld with data from the Sirona Galileos CBCT radiography unit for a comprehensive digital treatment protocol. What other directions could this marriage of technologies lead?
MacLeod: What’s exciting is that we are digitizing the oral cavity. We’ve done that with radiographs and a little bit with products like CEREC. But once you have digitized information, the possibilities are endless.

With a digital intraoral file, you can import the data into the Galileos CBCT software and combine the two sets of scan data for precision implant planning. Then the technician can design the crown using CEREC software and import that data into the Galileos software. Now you can see where you need to position the fixtures based on the final crown contour. That’s one example of the power of digitization. I can’t predict all the outcomes that will occur with digitizing the oral cavity, but I do know it’s an exciting time to be in this industry.

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