iTero Scanner

This is our Itero scanner. The reason it's called a scanner is because we have this wand, and it's not turned on right now, but this wand is lit, and when we go over the teeth, it takes the video image and loads it into our scanner. Once that is done, and it takes maybe 15 or 20 seconds to scan the entire mouth and get images of the teeth on the screen, it's really a wonderful tool. When I first saw it, I couldn't believe it because we've used photography in dentistry for a long time. But now, with a live video image, we can manipulate the image to make it more visible to patients. For example, here are some images of this patient's teeth. Patients have never really seen their teeth in this view before. They just see the front teeth. We can not only manipulate the image by rolling it around, but I can also isolate and say, "You know what? I want to see all the top teeth." I can rotate this down and say, "Okay, this is what the patient's teeth look like," and they can't see way back here. When I'm doing an examination, I'm not looking directly in the mouth just yet because I can see more here, so I can communicate more directly with the patient. This is a good example of a lot of different things. The patient has had a few crowns on the teeth, missing some teeth, and we see some old fillings. When dentists see things like this in the mouth that have been there for maybe a number of years and are not as healthy as they could be, I can tell the patient, "I think this tooth or all these teeth need some treatment." My recommendations might be fillings, a filling, or a crown or something. Inevitably, patients almost always say, "Well, what about that tooth? It doesn't look very healthy," or "What am I going to do to replace these teeth?" There's a co-conspirator there, I call it, for them to help self-diagnose their own teeth. Sometimes people get distracted by the color of teeth. They don't really like them. So I can say, "You know what? I want to look at the teeth without the color on it." Now they look like models or plaster casts that we have in our hand, and we can see how they fit. What else is really fun? I want to know what their bites are doing, so I can ask the computer, "Okay, where are the teeth touching each other? Why are they wearing down?" With this color-coated scheme, it tells me where the teeth are hitting and how intensely they're hitting. For example, red shows where they're hitting the heaviest, and other areas show where they're not hitting. It really starts giving me a lot of insight into what's happening in the mouth, and it's very accurate technology to do that. It's just a wonderful tool. It's probably the newest technology in dentistry that's really revolutionized how we treat patients on a regular day-to-day basis.