Week 2 – 02/20/2025
Ethan F -
Hello everyone! This week consisted of my shadowing of my on-site advisor Dr. Poulos. One of the first cases I got was an emergency case. The patient complained of a simple toothache, which later turned into six visits and tooth extractions that same day. I saw a new increase in digital dentistry in that case through the CBCT (Cone beam computed tomography) machine. That machine created a 3D model of the mouth and jaw through that simple scan. I heard this machine costs a lot, but will eventually bring in a lot of profit. This shows the initial start-up costs of adapting to a more ‘digital’ dental world and the perks that come with it. Later throughout the week, I furthermore saw how unexpected dentistry could be. For example, a simple crown turned into a root canal. During that root canal, Dr. Poulos mentioned how useful AI technology would be in making the root canal process easier. From what I saw, it is a very tedious and long process, involving many trials and errors when measuring how long the canal is in the tooth. Hopefully, throughout my research, I will be able to come across a platform that does that for dentists. Another glimpse of the changes from past dentistry to more digital dentistry I saw was the method of taking impressions for the crowns. Before the new technology, dentists would use clay and mold to take impressions of the mouth. That took a lot longer and could have led to mistakes in the mold not drying or shaping correctly. Now, it is all digital. Dentists use an iTero machine or a platform called 3Shape. Instead of using molds, the platform now just scans the whole mouth and provides a 3D model of the mouth and teeth. This is much more convenient now. I will continue doing research on this later on.
Best,
Ethan
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