How should I prepare for the scan?
No special preparation is needed for a CBCT scan of the head. You should wear comfortable, loose-fitting clothing for your CBCT exam. Anything that might interfere with imaging such as earrings, necklaces, piercing, hairpins or eyeglasses should be removed. The x-ray technician may ask you to also remove dentures or other appliances, but it is advisable to bring these along to the appointment as the technician may on occasion want to use them.
Staying Out of the Danger Zone
Using a software program, you can place implants in prospective sites and orient their placement and inclination with respect the cortical plates, nerves and blood vessels. You can then use sagittal plane views to evaluate prospective implant placement and to insure that implant depth or orientation does not endanger the nerves or blood vessels. In some software programs a warning message will automatically pop up if you place the implant fixture in a danger zone.
Minimizing Errors
This information can then be sent to a dental laboratory where a surgical guide stent will be fabricated that will ensure that the placement of the implant fixtures is highly accurate. It is precisely because of the great accuracy of this system in visualizing the anatomy that all decisions can be made prior to implant placement instead of relying upon clinical judgment during implant surgery. This system yields a more predictable outcome and minimizes the chance of misadventures.
Preventing Impingement or Penetration of Nerves
One of the more common complications of the surgical placement of dental implants is impingement upon or penetration of nerves. With this system, such an occurrence is prevented by careful treatment planning with a complete 3-dimensional depiction of the patient’s anatomy. The best time to use a CBCT scan and this kind of software is during the treatment planning stage, not after the patient returns with paresthesia. It is also important to note that nine patients have bled to death after the dentist miscalculated and severed a major blood vessel. A pre-operative CBCT scan was not taken in any of those nine cases.
What are the advantages of cone beam CT scanning over the traditional fan beam CT scans?
There are many advantages over traditional CT scans. First, with cone beam CT scanning the patient is subjected to far less radiation, because we use a focused beam with a physically larger sensor allowing us to capture all the axial slices covering the face and the jaws in one scan. Since we capture the entire volume with one scan, there is no redundant overlap of slices, resulting in major reduction of radiation. Reducing exposure to radiation while maximizing the information content should be a goal of all diagnostic imaging and we accomplish that very effectively with our i-CAT system.
The single most groundbreaking advantage of the i-CAT is easy, convenient and low-cost access to this imaging modality for the patient and the dentist. When this machine is in-office and the dentist has made the capital investment, superior and invaluable diagnostic information is produced for the patient whenever warranted, without the obstacles that forced compromises in the past.
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