Masters Student Department of Oral Surgery Complutense University of Madrid Madrid, Spain
Foreword
Dentistry has been facing major changes, and along with this transformation come challenges. A catchphrase would be: evolution will always be accompanied by initial difficulties. Here we are today.
I understand, dear reader, the natural resistance that we have when looking at new directions and techniques, because as human beings, we love a place called the “comfort zone”: a lovely place where nothing happens. My father, a retired dentist, had the same resistance that I see in a large number of colleagues today. In the past, we heard that, if you are used to a technique and material, you shouldn’t change it because it would be working “right” for you. Nothing more wrong and misleading, otherwise, no major evolution would have taken place and we would be using candles instead of electricity because “it’s been working so far.” The future comes in huge waves of change, which initially obviously cause suffering.
The digitalization of dentistry has impacted processes and procedures, as well as workflows and time involved in clinical procedures. Make no mistake: it’s not the future, it’s the present.
I don’t deny that there will always be room for individual talent, superb handicraft, and brilliant creativity in a unique case within our profession. But I believe that all art and creation will be accompanied by a less manually driven process and many digitalization tools, as we have already seen in plastic art and architecture.
This book fills a space in the high‐level literature, related to the processes and techniques of digital dentistry. In a way, it can be a great relief for the difficulty that some professionals have faced in accepting new technologies, an analgesic with an extremely detailed package leaflet. Conceptual resistance can only be dealt with by consistent information. After a long period of COVID and its restrictions and doubts, we know more than ever that only science can overcome old concepts and preconceptions.
Like me, you the reader will be able to reduce doubts and opinions based on concepts that are often outdated, and face the new, with KNOWLEDGE.
Ronaldo Hirata DDS, MS, PhD
Assistant Professor of Biomaterials NYU
Private practice in Curitiba, Brazil
International lecturer with more than 150 papers and four books published
Preface
As dental professionals, we should always make sure that our knowledge and skills are up to date to improve our ability to care for our patients. In the current congresses and symposia, a number of exhibitors have been demonstrating technological products to be used in most areas of dentistry. On social media, it is also common to see professionals showing interesting clinical results after using these new products and related techniques. Even in dental research, we can see many new articles and even some new scientific journals focused on digital dentistry.
As a young professor who had just come back from Harvard University to Brazil in 2015, I was very excited to bring the new methodologies to the dental clinic of my family in São Paulo. My main research interest at that time, however, was magnetic resonance imaging in dentistry. Furthermore, as a clinician, I was dedicated almost solely to implant dentistry and was not fully convinced about the benefits of image‐guided surgeries. Similarly, my father was already performing CAD‐CAM crowns, but still using conventional impressions with the polyvinyl siloxane materials that he always loved to use.
Three years later, I met some of the opinion leaders of digital dentistry, who are now very good friends of mine. We were lucky that dentistry in Brazil has always been very well developed and respected. As a result, several congresses and conferences brought us opportunities to see new courses and exhibitors, always with the most novel and exciting technologies and techniques for digital workflow in dentistry. Several clinicians were doing an amazing job in applying the new technologies to enhance predictability in performing the principles of dentistry, which were actually the same. Despite everything seeming so promising, I realized that the train of digital dentistry was still at the station as regards research and evidence‐based knowledge. At that point, I changed the main focus of my research to CAD‐CAM and digital dentistry, and since then I have been in love with the topic.
After obtaining clinical and scientific knowledge on CAD‐CAM, and talking to expert friends, I began to wonder: what if we had a book in the form of a step‐by‐step guide to provide evidence‐based knowledge of the techniques that professionals might want to perform using these new tools to improve their practice? In addition, what if this could come along with an atlas of clinical cases, performed by me, my father, and the professionals that I have always admired in digital dentistry?
As a result of a huge team effort, this book aims to help colleagues who are dentists, dental technicians, and other members of the dental team to improve their skills to promote patient care. We did our best to try to help our community here. On the other hand, we know that several techniques and approaches are still being developed and investigated. So, this book shows what we know so far, and what we have been doing with the existing tools, techniques, and knowledge, rather than trying to define what is the best approach for every clinical situation. There are three initial chapters describing basic knowledge of CAD‐CAM and eight other chapters covering all applications of digital dentistry. Since we also want the new methods to benefit all patients in a collective and inclusive way, there is also a chapter on the role of digital dentistry in preventive dentistry and public dental health. The final chapter is basically an atlas of clinical cases performed by the experts whom I have admired most in the field.
I really hope this book can be useful at some point in all our dental practices, and I thank all my co‐authors and my team at the University of Malta for all the support that I have received.
Thank you very much,
Professor Arthur R.G. Cortes
Chapter 1 Introduction to Digital Dentistry
Renan L.B. da Silva, Jun Ho Kim, Roberto A. Markarian, Rui Falacho, Djalma N. Cortes, Alan J.M. Costa, and Arthur R.G. Cortes
SUMMARY
This chapter will discuss all the terms and definitions that the dental professional needs to know to understand the procedures discussed in the following chapters. Such definitions include abbreviations and general concepts of digital imaging and digital workflow. The chapter also presents a history of the use of CAD‐CAM in dentistry in the last two decades, and the basic knowledge required plus ideas and alternatives to start with digital dentistry.
1.1 Definitions
Digital dentistry is the term used to describe the different modalities of dental treatment workflow that are mostly performed with the use of digital technologies. Several digital methods have been incorporated to dental practice to replace conventional methods and techniques
