Balancing the Strengths of Your Scanning Equipment

Desktop scanners retain their place in the laboratory workflow

Erika Ramirez, CDT

As more dentists adopt digital workflows and intraoral scanning, it is important to understand the strengths of various scanning technologies and recognize where desktop scanners still offer certain advantages. Desktop scanners continue to develop and improve at a rapid pace even as intraoral scanning draws the attention of the industry.

Why is desktop scanning still so important for the dental laboratory?

I work in an in-house laboratory, so I often do work while patients are in the chair. The desktop scanner is easily accessible and integrates well into my workflow, enabling me to perform quick and precise work. Many clinicians are still in a transition phase with intraoral scanners and digital record-keeping, so traditional impressions are still commonly used. Because of this, we need to be able to pour impressions and scan those models and/or impressions precisely, making desktop scanners essential in our day-to-day work in the lab.

What would you say is the greatest strength of today's desktop scanners?

The ability to achieve clear margins when scanning with a desktop scanner is such an advantage. It won't have the same color definition as you get with an intraoral scanner, but it is still much more accurate when it comes to the margins. One thing that also helps us achieve better resolution on the margins is that we can scan an individual die of the model, whereas with intraoral scanning you are scanning the patient directly and so cannot remove a tooth to scan as an individual. Although some IOS systems have developed features such as zoom functions to achieve similar results, desktop scanning remains highly efficient. It allows users to easily capture a full arch model and then selectively scan any individual die with much more precision.

Key Takeaway

Desktop scanning technology continues to improve, offering greater speed and resolution than previous generations. Meanwhile, the ability to scan models and individual dies with desktop scanners continues to be advantageous, providing high scanning accuracy and precision.

About the Author

Erika Ramirez, CDT, is lab manager at Gdental in New York, New York.