A dentist in St. Albert is working to speed up dental procedures using artificial intelligence and 3D printing.
Colin Diener, owner of Nuvo Dental in St. Albert and associate professor of restorative dentistry at the University of Alberta, spoke with the Gazette this month about his work to speed up all-on-X dental procedures.
Diener said he and his team have spent the past year and a half working on a faster way to create full-mouth dental implants, which replace a complete set of upper and lower teeth. The process involves 3D printing, 3D imaging and an AI-powered anesthesia pump.
Traditionally, dentists create implants by taking casts of the patient’s teeth and using a complex vise called an articulator to determine how the new teeth should fit together.
“The problem with these devices is that they don’t cover the face,” Diener said, which is a problem because teeth are supposed to align with the eyes and other facial features. This results in less accuracy, more adjustments and more visits to the dentist.
Dentists recently began using scanners to create computer models of a patient’s face and teeth, which allows them to design implants and virtually plan surgeries with extreme precision, Diener said. 3D printers can also now print implants on-site in minutes, rather than waiting hours for a specialist to mill them off-site.
Diener said a third technology — an AI pump — got his team thinking about how to make these implants in new ways.
Hollis Lai, a professor of dentistry at the University of Alberta who has studied target-controlled infusion pumps, said they are widely used in dentistry outside of North America. Instead of manually sedating patients, these pumps use AI to continuously adjust the sedation dose based on the patient’s vital signs, speeding up recovery.
Diener said the pump reduces recovery time from sedation from hours to minutes.
“You press ‘stop’ on the infusion pump … and you wake up in a few minutes.”
Diener said he and his team are currently working on options for how to use these technologies in all-on-X surgeries. If the protocol works, they hope to reduce the time it takes to perform an operation from about eight hours to about four.
“It’s a very laborious process, the way it’s done traditionally,” he says. If it can be sped up, life will be easier for both the patient and the dentist.
Diener says he believes his team is the first in Canada to try to combine the three technologies, in part because there aren’t many private dental offices in Canada that can administer anesthesia. His team hopes to have the protocol ready by this fall — when Health Canada is expected to approve the ultra-high-precision scanners needed for the protocol. He hopes to start teaching it to students later this year.
Diener predicts that the three technologies will be commonplace in dentistry in about a decade.
“This is the technology of the future.”
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