Digital Impressions

The introduction of dental digital impressions was first made by Dr. Francois Duret in 1974. In early 1980s, Werner Mörmann and Marco Brandestini presented their concept of chairside CAD/CAM technology for the fabrication of ceramic restorations, a technology which was branded as CEREC (computer-assisted CERamic REConstruction). Today there are multiple intraoral and laboratory scanners in the dental market. These scanners use different recording methods, including color-coded fringe projection pulsed light, triangulation/color-coded fringe projection, parallel confocal recording, active wavefront sampling, projected pattern triangulation, confocal, monochrome fringe projection/disparity, and confocal/moire effect. With the evolution of the hardware and associated software, the accuracy of the scanners is becoming very high, equaling or even surpassing that of elastomeric (polyvinylsiloxanes, polyether, and vinylsiloxanethers) impression materials. This fact will make digital intraoral scanning as the predominant method of impression taking for fixed, removable and implant restorations in the near future.