Surgical Scans Made Easy

One of the challenges of creating surgical guides for full arch restorations is making a scan with a radio-opaque material. Typically, an interim prosthesis is in place prior to the scan and final prosthesis.

There are many different ways to get this done; replicate the denture and make a barium infused duplicate, make a vacuform over the denture and paint the inside with barium, or use the denture and paint the denture with barium. All have the benefit of giving the surgeon and restorative dentist tooth position of the denture teeth relative to the bone and proposed implant sites.

Great Lakes Ortho has just introduced a new radio-opaque material to be used with their MiniStar device. It has the advantage of being visible on the scan without painting anything on the denture or into an overlay and the added benefit of uniform radio-opacity. That uniformity results in a crystal clear scan and very clear tooth shape.