It’s not that CAD/CAM won’t revolutionize the industry, it is certainly already doing that and will continue to do so, but it is unlikely that it will do so in the hands of dentists. Any lab owners or technicians who have been losing sleep over the imminent loss of their livelihoods can relax. In theory it appeals to quite a few dentists too, as they see an opportunity to cut out the mold and the middleman - the poor technician. This is a scenario that definitely appeals to patients - a single visit with no need to wander around with a temporary crown that offers them savings in both time and money. After a little finishing and preparation work, the crown is ready for fitting, and the satisfied patient is heading back to work.

The digitized scan can then be sent to an on-site milling or 3-D printing machine to carve the crown from a block of porcelain, or print it from resin while the patient relaxes in the waiting room. Instead of making a mold and sending it to a lab for scanning, a well-equipped dentist can use a variety of technologies, from intraoral cameras to CBT, to scan teeth directly. A process that traditionally took weeks, can now be done in an hour or two. The technology is available to allow dentists to scan patients’ teeth and create crowns for patients while they wait. The doomsday scenario in many technicians’ minds is that the advances in scanning technologies, coupled with more powerful and capable software, feeding virtual 3-D models to ever cheaper and more accurate 3-D printers, will mean dentists will be able to handle their own manufacturing needs.Īccording to the manufacturers and purveyors of the various digital dental technologies, that day has already arrived. The question worrying some, especially the older and more established labs and technicians, is whether its arrival is sounding the death knell of the traditional, craftsmen-based prosthetics and restoration business, or heralding a boom that will see more demand in Asia’s developing economies?

While everyone seems to agree that “the future is now,” there was also some ambivalence and trepidation toward the future that is knocking on the doors of Asia’s dental labs and surgeries. They were also discussed in many of the lectures, but perhaps they were most frequently in the lecture halls and break rooms of the Dental Technician Forum, one of three new tracks introduced to IDEM Singapore. So it’s hardly a surprise that when close to 8,000 dental professionals from every aspect of the industry got together in Singapore in April for IDEM Singapore 2014, the exhibition halls were full of these topics. It seems whenever dental professionals get together it’s not long before at least one of these topics is discussed. High tech buzz words like digital dentistry, CAD/CAM, intraoral scanning, extraoral scanning, 3-D milling, and 3-D printing are reverberating throughout the dental industry.

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