3D Digital Technology:

Smart Dental offices use  digital x rays which are 90% less radiation compared to traditional x- rays and images that are produced give us more information than the conventional ones.

In his ongoing effort to bring you the best of what dentistry has to offer, Dr. Samuel is one of the first general dentist to offer the benefit of Digital 3-D x-ray scans to his patients.  The Galileos Cone Beam system was installed March, 2010.

 Now our patients will fully benefit  from the revolutionary cone beam Digital 3-D technology of the Galileos. At  SMART DENTAL the doctors are no longer limited to interpreting 2-D x-rays and make “educated guesses”.  A quick 14 second outside the mouth scan is all it takes to generate 200 of excellent quality images. Patients will not have to suffer through 18 uncomfortable individual inside-the-mouth x-rays. This is especially great news for people with a high gag reflex, small mouths or who have difficulty taking conventional x-rays.

With the Galileos images Dr. Samuel can see inside the bone and teeth in 3 dimensions, making diagnosis more exact and accurate.   This translates more predictable and safer treatment outcomes. The Galileos gives vastly more information with 4 times less radiation than a complete set of digital x-rays and 80-100 times less radiation than traditional CAT scans. In addition, both jaws and the sinuses are clearly seen with the 3-D Galileos scan, while a complete set of 18-22 individual 2-D x-rays only show the teeth and a little bit of the surrounding bone.  

 Improved diagnosis with the Galileos is just the tip of the iceberg.  Not only can Dr. Samuel finally see the extent and proximity of tooth decay to the tooth nerve, but with horizontal slices though the tooth we will be able to accurately identify all the nerves in the tooth. At SMART DENTAL, we have observed a 50-60% root canal failure rate during initial exams of new patients to our practice. Many of these root canal re-infections are due to missed nerves. Some teeth have 1-2 additional nerves in their teeth.

When these nerves are not found and not treated properly the tooth may remain painful or become infected months to years later following treatment. Armed with the Galileos 3-D scans, the possibility of missing any additional nerves will become a virtual impossibility in our dental office. This will vastly reduce or eliminate the need for Apicoectomy surgery or the need to remove the crown and posts in the future in order to re-do the root canal treatment. Our patients can feel confident that their treatment was done right the first time and no additional time, expense, irritation and pain will be a part of their future because of missed nerves during root canal treatment.

Combined with the CEREC CAD/CAM system, which is a 3-D surface scanning technology that allows us to make Porcelain crowns and veneers right in our office in one visit, the Galileos facilitates dental implant procedures that are faster, safer, more precise and less costly. In addition, many dental implant procedures can now be minimally invasive and without incision! This technology has allowed Dr. Samuel to reduce his implant fees for a single tooth implant below the cost of a 3-tooth bridge. Unlike most implant surgeries that are eyeballed, all of our implant procedures are done with a surgical guide that allows placement of a dental implant to 1/10^th of a millimeter accuracy in all 3-dimentions form the virtual plan using the Galileos implant positioning software. This level of predictability is a true leap forward in dental implant treatment.