What Digital Impressions Reveal About Your Teeth

For dental restorations like crowns or bridges or orthodontic treatment like braces, getting accurate measurements of your teeth and bite is crucial to successful treatment, a precise fit, and comfort.

For many of us, dental impressions meant trays filled with goopy, messy, putty-like material that smelled bad and took what seemed like an eternity to set. All the while, you felt like you were about to choke or gag. But that wasn’t the worst part. To get the trays out of your mouth, your provider needed to perform an awkward tug of war.

Thankfully, those days are over, says Dr. Jean Seibold McGill at McGill Orthodontics in Easton and Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. In this blog, Dr. McGill shares her insight on digital impressions and how they might be one of the best advancements in dental technology ever.

Digital impressions explained

With medical technology, most of us are more familiar with diagnostics like ultrasounds and MRIs. Digital technology for dentistry is similar, but with digital dental impressions, the overall purpose is to use digital technology as a mapping tool instead of a diagnostic tool.

A digital impression is a way to scan your mouth, collecting specific data about the precise location, size, and shape of your teeth, as well as other structures surrounding your teeth such as your gums, soft tissue, and bones.

Your provider uses this important data to create custom restorations like veneers, crowns, or bridges, and to create your orthodontic treatment plan. Here at McGill Orthodontics, we use advanced technology to enhance your comfort and maximize your treatment outcome. We utilize digital impressions to fabricate custom braces and clear aligners.

Map out the size and shape of oral cavity structures

Enhancing patient comfort is a huge plus of digital impressions, but enabling providers to precisely map out the placement, size, and shape of your teeth, and the surrounding bones and soft tissue, can’t be underestimated.

Your provider uses a device called an intraoral scanner to create digital impressions. An intraoral scanner includes a handheld wand equipped with a camera and special software, all connected to a computer. 

Your provider inserts the compact wand into your mouth and gently moves it over the surface of your teeth, capturing 3D images and precise measurements of each tooth and the placement of bones, gums, and soft tissue.

With traditional dental impressions, it can be challenging to clearly capture all the nooks and crannies inside your mouth that can be crucial to a successful restoration or orthodontic treatment plan. This is especially true for patients with smaller mouths. 

With digital impressions, since the handheld wand is small and flexible, getting deep into the oral cavity is much easier, enabling your provider to capture accurate and precise data. Your provider then uploads the data collected to a dental laboratory to fabricate your custom restorations.

The crucial data collected from digital impressions helps inform details like how long your treatment plan will take, how many sets of clear aligners are needed to complete your treatment, and when you’ll need to switch to the next set.

Real-time, fast, and efficient data

The real-time aspect of digital impressions means capturing data from your entire mouth takes a matter of minutes — less time than for the material of a traditional dental impression to set. Since your provider can immediately view your images on a monitor, any errors or unclear scans can immediately be noticed and retaken. 

Doing an additional scan is a lot easier and much more precise than having a start all over with the messy, goopy traditional dental impressions. Your provider can even enlarge your scans to make sure your entire mouth is accurately mapped out.

But that’s not where the pluses of real-time data end. Because digital impressions capture data as a digital file, that information can easily be uploaded and emailed to the dental laboratory as opposed to shipping a physical mold. When you’re getting braces or a restoration, the last thing you want to do is to add more time to the process.

If you’d like to get started on your journey to your dream smile or learn more about digital impressions, contact McGill Orthodontics. Call our office most convenient to you or request your appointment online today.