Oral surgery and Implantology in the digital era

We live in the digital era. The digital devices have become part of our lives and we are using them every day.

They involve dentistry too.

A frequent mistake is to consider oral surgery and implantology as independent procedures not integrated with the comprehensive treatment plan and above all the prosthetic planning.

Our patients ask us for teeth, not implants and that’s why we have to plan prosthetics first.

The digital approach helps a lot in this field.

When we start a surgical plane on e new patient data we need DICOM files from a CBCT and STL files from an intraoral scanner. We can acquire other digital data about occlusion to design the shape and position of new teeth. At this point, we have a digital project that the patient can approve.

We can use programs that are also shared to match DICOM and STL files to create a digital patient. Only after that, we can design the artificial roots (dental implant) and if we need, a new bone volume to regenerate. To create this volume we can use free programs available on the net and export files to create devices like grids useful for the regeneration. Obviously, the implant insertion is made by 3D printed surgical stents or navigation to precisely replicate the planning. The whole process is exactly contrary to what we did in the past: the bone volume to regenerate is dictated by the implant position that is designed as a consequence of the prosthetic planning. Further developments will be due to the implementation of Artificial Intelligence (A. I.).

Already programs exploit the AI for segmentation and basic diagnostic processes (like detectection of the inferior alveolar nerve).

Shortly, the A.I. will substitute human judgment for more complex processes in medicine reducing mistakes.

Also, medical journals are preparing to receive this revolution. The New English Journal of Medicine, the most important medical review in the world, will present in 2024 NEMJ AI for international researchers.

Some are scared of this revolution, but I think that, under human control, this will be a great opportunity to improve the treatment of our patients