How Dental Technology Can Improve Your Oral Health

Dental technology has evolved in a variety of ways to help your dentist manage pain and inform treatment options. Here, our North Vancouver dentists explain some of the technological tools we use during dental procedures.

What is dental technology?

When you visit your dentist, you might notice that dental technology, tools, and treatment have changed since you were a kid. A range of technologies now help dentists detect and treat many dental issues.

Digital Dental Impressions

If you’ve ever had to get braces, a retainer, implant, mouth guard, or other appliance, you've no doubt dreaded the feeling of that U-shaped tray in your mouth, filled with the alginate or polyvinyl siloxane that's required to make an accurate mold of your teeth.

But with digital dental impressions, we do away with the goop in favour of using optical scanning devices to create virtual, computer-generated models of your mouth's hard and soft tissues. These devices capture accurate data in just minutes - without the mess.

Digital Dental X-rays

Every so often, your dentist puts a large camera up to the side of your head, takes a picture, and examines the negatives of your teeth. Now, we use digital sensors instead of traditional photographic X-ray film to capture images. This results in fewer retakes, and detailed computer images of your gums, teeth, and other parts of your mouth.

Digital dental X-rays allow your dentist to get clear images of your teeth, so your dentist can make a diagnosis.

Panoramic X-rays

While traditional X-rays provide multiple images of your mouth, we take panoramic dental X-rays to make just one image of your entire mouth. This image includes your teeth, upper and lower jaws, temporomandibular joints (TMJ), and your nasal and sinus areas.

This gives the dentist a flat representation of your jaw’s curved structure and allows us to analyze each part of your mouth in relation to the whole.

Dental Lasers

Lasers deliver energy in the form of light. Soft tissue lasers are used in a wide range of treatments for gum-related issues, from treating conditions such as canker sores and gum disease and performing biopsies.

Dental lasers can reduce your risk of infection, potentially shorten your healing time thanks to less damage to the gums, and result in less blood loss than traditional dental surgery.

Oral ID

Oral abnormalities such as cancerous and pre-cancerous lesions are challenging to identify with the naked eye. This minimally invasive device screens for oral cancer using fluorescence visualization technology to detect issues.

iTero Intraoral Scanner

Have you ever dreaded holding your mouth in an awkward position while the dentist takes the images they need? That discomfort could be gone when we use an iTero intraoral digital scanner to scan your mouth. This device lets us capture three-dimensional dental images in minutes.

Using the scanner, we create accurate physical dental models for restorative dental work, such as dental veneers, crowns, implants, and more.

Sleep Technologies

Have you been diagnosed with sleep apnea? We use technology to test whether you may need oral appliance treatment. Technology can be used to makes dental procedures run smoother, with potentially less pain for patients.

To learn more about the dental technology offered at Canyon Dental Centre, schedule your appointment today.