Virtual SurgICAL PLANNING

Dr. Pitcher has placed a special emphasis in his practice on the use of virtual surgical planning for placement of dental implants, wisdom tooth removal, bone grafting, and jaw reconstruction. Use of virtual surgical planning increases the precision and accuracy of surgery. This in turn improves surgical outcomes and decreases your recovery time and risk of complications.

3-D Imaging

The first step in virtual surgical planning is to obtain a cone-beam CT. This allows Dr. Pitcher to see your jaws in three dimensions. Seeing your jaws in three dimensions is important to visualize important anatomy and allows your surgeon to develop a patient-specific and individualized treatment plan. Virtual surgical planning software allows your surgeon to simulate your surgery during the planning stage in order to develop a detailed surgical plan. We also have a digital intraoral impression scanner to obtain an immediate 3-D scan of your teeth to maximize our digital treatment planning capabilities.

Treatment planning for Dental Implants

3implantguide

For tooth replacement with placement of dental implants, Dr. Pitcher is able to virtually design your replacement tooth (teeth) with your restorative dentist and place virtual implants in your jaw to determine to appropriate size, position, depth, and angulation of your implants to optimize your functional outcomes.

This will also help determine if you have enough bone in your upper or lower jaw for implant placement and if you require bone grafting procedure prior to or at the time of implant placement.

Once the plan is finalized, Dr. Pitcher uses Image Guided Surgery with the X-Guide Navigation System to position the implants in the planned locations.

wisdom tooth removal

While a 2-dimensional panorex is usually sufficient to remove your wisdom teeth, there are some circumstances when your wisdom teeth appear to be positioned closely to surrounding structures and additional imaging is necessary. 3-dimensional imaging is used to visualize the important anatomy in your upper and jaws around your wisdom teeth to plan the surgical approach and help minimize the risk of complications.