iTero Scanner – DeLand, FL

What is an iTero Scanner?

The iTero scanner is a special device that quickly takes thousands of pictures of the inside of your mouth. These images are used to assemble a highly-detailed 3D model of your teeth, gums, and bite. This lets us perform a full assessment and inspect every aspect of the inside of your mouth when designing your treatment.

The pictures are taken using a small, handheld scanner called a wand that uses low-radiation lasers to capture about 20 images of the teeth every second. During the process, the wand is gradually moved and rotated throughout the mouth. Overall, it usually takes less than 10 minutes to create a digital model of your smile using iTero, during which you’ll easily be able to relax.

How We Use iTero

The iTero scanner is extremely useful for any kind of dental treatment that would benefit from a thorough knowledge of the inside of your mouth. In particular, these scans are our preferred way of planning an Invisalign treatment and designing restorations like crowns, bridges and dental implants. The improved accuracy is ideal for laying out a long-term orthodontic treatment, and for restorations, the higher-quality impressions help us provide prosthetics that look more natural and fit more securely. With a better fit, restorations are much less likely to cause issues within the bite or experience excessive wear and tear, so they are able to easily last for decades. Over time, this means a patient will need fewer replacements, ensuring they’ll spend much less time and money maintaining their smile.

Benefits of iTero

• Fewer Rejections: On occasion, a traditional dental impression is rejected by a dental lab if it’s deemed to be defective or inaccurate, meaning you’d have to return to our dental office for another impression. iTero, however, corrects its own errors in real time, so a digital impression is much less likely to create problems. The scans can even catch key issues that could affect your treatment.
• Improved Fit: Studies have shown that crowns, bridges dental implants, and Invisalign aligners created from iTero suffered from far fewer fit issues.
• Faster Turnaround: Digital iTero scans can be sent directly to the lab online to greatly speed up the turnaround time for a patient’s treatment. And of course, the impressions can be taken far faster, so you’ll spend less time in the dental chair overall.
• More Comfortable: Traditional dental putty creates a mess and might even cause certain patients to gag; iTero avoids these issues entirely.
• A Simulated Outcome: Another perk of digital scans is that they can be used to simulate what your teeth will ultimately look like after your treatment is completed so you’ll know exactly what to expect.

A Cleaner, Easier Way to Get Invisalign, Too

When a patient is interested in getting Invisalign, the first step is to take impressions of your teeth as they are now. The impressions are used as a guide by the lab that makes the Invisalign aligners. The traditional way to get a dental impression is to use a special dental putty, but not only is this method prone to mistakes, it can also be very uncomfortable for the patient. At Dr. Cowell’s dental office, we can use iTero Scanners as alternative to traditional putty for increased accuracy and convenience.

Want to Learn More? Visit Our Dental Office Today!

Curious how the iTero scanner and our other kinds of advanced technology can give you a better grin with less hassle? Schedule a consultation at our dental office in DeLand today and learn about the modern dental offices we use to ensure that your oral treatment is always a brilliant success!