Titlu: To be or not to be digital?

Medic primar – Chirurgie Orală și Maxilo-Facială, Facultatea de Medicină Dentară, UMF „Victor Babeș” Timișoara.

Assist. Prof. Dr. Șerban Talpoș DMD, MD, PhD, Faculty of Dental Medicine, UMF “Victor Babeş” Timişoara, Senior doctor – Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery

In today’s implantology, there are more and more challenges to ensure the highest possible success rate, starting with surgery and ending with prosthetics. Thus, the surgical methods of inserting dental implants can be individualized for each individual case, depending on the bone supply and the dental ridges relationships, with great precision and accuracy, having available digital technology, which is also increasingly advanced, from one year to another, from one month to another.

But can all cases be solved with the help of digital planning? In the case of certain concepts of implanto-prosthetic rehabilitation (such as All-on-4), where the limitation of bone supply is not always a contraindication to such treatment, the digital method can be difficult to translate into reality or even impossible. In these cases, the „free-hand” method may even be the method of choice!

Virtual planning, with the creation of surgical guides by superimposing the model made after the intra-oral scan with the 3D reconstruction images of the patient’s volumetric CT, is not always easy, it even requires advanced knowledge of dental implantology and implant prosthetics.

If the planning is correct/good, the treatment will have a good result. However, if the digital planning is not within the parameters of correct three-dimensional positioning of the implants, consistent with the bone supply and occlusal relationships, treatment failure can occur even from the surgical phase.