Improvements in Dental Restoration

Crowns are used in dental restoration to cap vulnerable teeth or dental implants. Crowns are also fabricated to hold a cracked tooth together, keep dental bridges in place, or to camouflage misshapen or discolored teeth. All these improve the appearance of teeth. As effective as crowns are in improving the form and function of teeth, fabricating crowns was once a very painstaking and time-consuming process that could span several weeks.

Thankfully, with the development of new technologies, fabricating dental crowns has become not only faster, but more efficient in restoring patient’s teeth. New technologies such as the CEREC 3D system are changing the way patients experience dental restoration.

The CEREC 3D system is a dental device that allows crowns to be milled and restored in the patients’ mouth in one day. This eliminates the need for multiple visits, oral examinations, and the use of large doses of anesthesia which causes discomfort in patients. It utilizes CAD/CAM technology to create customized crowns in just one appointment. The dentist starts by scanning the patient’s mouth with an infrared camera. The optical images are rendered into a 3D graphical image. Then, a crown is fashioned using 3D software to fit the teeth’s form and function. After this, the dentist’s impressions are sent to a milling chamber where a machine mills the crown according to the dentist’s specifications.

The freshly milled crown can be fully- restored in the patient’s mouth by the dentist LA even before the anesthesia wears off. It’s efficient, relatively painless, and a huge improvement from older technologies. In addition, many materials have been used to fabricate crowns. Among the strongest are gold crowns. Gold crowns are not only highly durable, but are extremely resilient and can last for a long time.

Gold is also very malleable, which enables the dentist LA to fashion a crown to fit the exact shape of the tooth. On the downside, gold is a conspicuous color that does not match the natural coloring of tooth enamel. Because of this, gold is rarely used for the front teeth and tends to be placed on the back teeth.

Another option is porcelain fused to a metal crown. The metal provides the base to strengthen the crown and the porcelain is placed on top of it by the dentist LA to camouflage the metal. Porcelain closely matches the natural coloring of tooth enamel and is preferable from an aesthetic viewpoint.