What's New In Digital Dentistry
By Dr. Thomas K. Hedge

There are a number of new developments in digital applications to dentistry. I will review three of the many new developments in this article.

The first major development is the introduction of the D60 camera by Canon. My favorite digital camera has been the Canon D30. It has all the right stuff - Great color, resolution and ease of use. This camera has sold for $3000 for the camera body. The 100 mm macro lens and Through the Lens metered ring flash has added another $1200 to the cost for a total of about $4200.

The D30 has recently been replaced by the D60. There are no major changes in design or function. The major changes are that the resolution has been improved from 3.11 to 6.48 megapixels and the price of the body has dropped by $1000. This puts the total package at $3200. Moore’s Law that has been used to describe processor speed and cost, now seems to apply to digital cameras. Moore’s law states that processor speed will double at half the cost every 7 months.

For those of you that recently bought a D30, rest assured that the resolution at 3.11 megapixels is more than sufficient for dental applications.

The next major development is the introduction of artificial vision to evaluate the shade. This includes an actual shade map in terms of a dental shade guide such as Vita, Ivoclar, etc. These shade evaluations can also include hue, value, chroma, translucency, and image enhancement. I have been currently evaluating the Shade Scan system from Cynovad, a Montreal, Canada company. A Shade Scan unit is at LVI in the high tech room. Ask Mike Miyasaki about it the next time you are there.

I am taking a shade scan on every new patient in addition to a full digital photographic series including a studio portrait. The shade scan has a number of benefits. First, the patient is truly “wowed” by the technology. Another benefit is to quantify for a patient the shade of their teeth. We have typically held up a shade tab and declared the patient, A2 or something like that. The shade scan maps a tooth with a region of A3, D2 around that and A2 at the incisal. I pull up all the shade tabs that make up their color and tell them that they should go to B1 on a value ordered shade tab. This has increased our acceptance of bleaching considerably.

The final benefit is the obvious one of shade communication to the lab. We all know how difficult it is to match a single central incisor. We also know that Bill would say that he never matches a single tooth because he does them all!

The final benefit I want to discuss is the new digital X ray system from X Image. The major innovation is the fact that the system is housed in a notebook computer with a compact flash card reader and a wireless connection to your network. It can also act as a stand alone portable image storage device that can be moved from room to room. The unit is bigger than a palm pilot and smaller than a laptop computer.

This device can be the total digital solution, with the ability to store, manipulate, and view digital images and X rays. The unit has an LCD monitor with a 6x8 screen.

These are but a few of the major changes that have presented themselves over the last two months. Remember, it is not a question of whether or not you will go digital, but when.