How does digital dental monitoring work?

Upon sitting in the chair, the dentist asks, “How does your mouth feel? Does anything feel different?” The patient reports, “Everything feels okay, I think, but sometimes I feel like my teeth are shifting. And by the way, are my gums receding up here?” Sounds familiar? In fact, we hear things like this from patients all the time. But how can we tell if something has changed?

How to identify small oral health changes at an early stage?

For the majority of my 16 years in practice, when patients come in for their bi-annual recall visits, we dentists have relied on radiographs (x-rays), visual examination, chart notes, and photographs to follow and manage a patient’s oral health. And the data acquired with these methods is still a very important component of our records. However, when small changes occur in the mouth over the years it can be difficult to definitively quantify, measure, compare and identify them at an early stage.

Although annual radiographs can be compared from one year to the next to assess cavities and jawbone levels, there are many other variables that are not visible on a two-dimensional x-ray. Including, but not limited to, soft tissue changes, tooth shifting, tooth wear and gingival levels (gum tissue positions).

Getting data without radiation or fear of gagging

An emerging paradigm shift occurring today is the use of digital intraoral scans to create objective data sets annually that can be analyzed by the dental team to measure changes in the mouth. These scans are obtained without the use of radiation, traditional impression material or fear of gagging from the patient’s perspective.