cone beam CE

cone beam1_2012 Fig. 6_Lipsig’s top 5 choices for Bordeaux wine: • Chateau Lafite Rothschild • Chateau Margaux • Chateau Latour • Chateau Mouton-Rothschild • Chateau Haut-Brion (Photo/www.sxc.hu) practice matters _ interview I industry, assisting users in doing things that they could not do before. What have been the major developments over the years in imaging technology and how do you see it progressing? The power found in today’s computers is one of the major developments that allow us to do more. It takes minimal computer power to handle practice management, which are mostly text driven files that are not very large and do not take much power to rendertothescreen.Imagingisquitedifferent.Two- dimensionalimagescantakemuchmorecomputing power. X-rays are actually single images displayed in grayscale, although they can be high resolution, which makes them a bit larger and harder to deal with. Yet,full-colorimagesfromintraoralcamerasand digital cameras take a bit more processing power; especially if you realize that the live previews found inintraoralcamerasareactuallyrenderingmanyfull color images/frames per second on the screen. The current CAD/CAM and CBCT files are so large that it would have been nearly impossible to move/render the image files that we use today. While the power of the computer has made most of this technology usable, other technological ad- vances make some of these systems function better than others. New laser scanning in some CAD/CAM systems allows you to avoid the need to prepare the subjectwithpowder,whichisoftenusedasacontrast agenttoavoidreflectionwhenscanningimages.And someofthenewCBCTsystemsofferadjustablefields of view to avoid higher radiation doses that are un- necessary for certain focused procedures. It was the combination of such new advance- ments that led us to some of the best pairings in technology whereby the industry leaders in CBCT and CAD/CAM paired together the best of the best technologies to create the best solutions in the mar- ketplace today. E4D Compass [D4D Technologies, Richardson, Texas] is a great example of this. This is technology that assists clinicians to do more. Anyadditionalthoughtsonthefuture? The future will be incredible. Computing power that originally needed a room the size of a gymna- sium is now available in your watch. They say that if theautomobileindustryhadprogressedasmuchand as quickly as the computer industry that we would all be driving in cars that could travel at the speed of sound and cost a nickel. IstillrememberthefirsttimeIhadapictureinmy mind of what videoconferencing might look like. I picturedastandardtouch-tonephonehangingfrom the wall with the chord hanging down and a small viewingscreenattachedtoitontheside;muchmore likeanintercomsystemfromagatewhereyoucould see someone on the other end. I never would have anticipated how quickly we would have face time conversations on full color screens the size of a few credit cards, such as the iPhone. The rate of progress has been amazing. Technol- ogy such as cone beam gives us more data than ever before and the uses of this data are just beginning to come to light. Three-dimensional imaging is the future of dentistry in many ways, and the sooner it is embraced,thesoonerwewillreapthebenefits.Iper- sonallycan’twaittoshowyouwhatiscomingnext!_ I 37 Fig. 6 ‘There are some wines that are bursting with flavor, yet pair them with a particular food and ... you can suddenly decipher nuances that you never noticed before.’