A novel handheld 3-D oral scanner that can digitally capture images of the inside of a patient's mouth has been developed by researchers from MIT and Harvard.
Traditionally, dentists have made dental impressions by having patients bite down on a moldable silicone material. Such impressions, however, can be messy and uncomfortable, and sometimes inaccurate, researchers said.
A group of researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and business students from Harvard University began working to commercialise a novel handheld scanner that could digitally capture three-dimensional images of the inside of a patient's mouth.
The innovation that allows fast, real-time digital dental impressions, was developed by Brontes Technologies.
The team's invention, dubbed the Lava Chairside Oral Scanner (or Lava COS), has already been sold to thousands of dentists worldwide, researchers said.
MIT professor Douglas Hart said that ushering an innovation from the lab to the market - and then selling it for millions - is a somewhat uncommon path for researchers.
The core of the Lava COS technology originated in the early 2000s, when Hart was working on seeding fluids with particles and scanning them at high speeds with a pulsing laser - a process known as particle imaging velocimetry.
Hart and his team took a research detour and invented a novel, video-rate 3-D scanner that used a single camera lens and a timed rotating aperture.
They coordinated that hardware with image-processing algorithms and modelling software to create fast 3-D images in real-time.
The Lava COS - newly minted as the 3M True Definition Scanner - features a "wand," about the shape and size of an electric toothbrush.
Dentists manoeuvre the wand around the inside of a patient's mouth, like a hand-piece; the wand takes dozens of photos of the teeth and feeds the 3-D data, in real-time, to a touch screen for the dentists' use.
