The year has come to an end, and it was touch and go for awhile. The normal week-before-Christmas cancelations didn’t come, but of course all the emergencies came out of the woodwork.  Five long days, from morning to night, it was bananas.

Broken teeth, people in from out of town, and the following week I am to be out of the office. The perfect storm that CEREC can help tremendously.

One particular case that stands out and makes me publicly thank (Sirona’s Manager of CEREC software) Mr. Ingo Zimmer was a broken crown I did a few years ago. The patient was back in town to visit her family. I got her to come in at 6:30 a.m. prior to my other patients, and proceeded to redo it. I proceeded to do the visit as normal. Give a block, apply Liquid Reference, take buccal bite and opposing, and in this case I took a pre-op even though I was planning on utilizing Biogeneric.

I took the pre-op because:

1. I was trying out a new workflow
2. I wanted to copy an old PFM with a fractured DB cusp
3. No real reason

I removed the old PFM and the recurrent decay that extended pretty far sub-G, rebuilt a core and refined prep. Nothing out of the ordinary, and things looked good, just took some time to get this completed. Rendered the proposal and looked from the buccal and saw my marginal ridges were way off. Then I looked at the clock and saw that the appointment time for my next patient was quickly approaching. In my sleep-deprived state, I messed up the buccal bite and didn’t pick it up.

What to do? Re-image buccal bite and possibly the prep and opposing? Guess at the occlusion and grind it in? But this would take time. Then it hit me I had the extra folder! Even though I was doing Biogeneric I have the flexibility in 4.0 to do so many things efficiently. I could edit restoration and turn it to Bio-copy if I wanted. In this case, I just overlaid the Bio-copy folder on the virtual model and used that to establish the occlusion. By taking 30 seconds to take the Bio-copy folder, I save a bunch of time in the long run due to my missing a good buccal bite.

So the answer is C. But I was real lucky that I did do the extra imaging. The extra folders help add flexibility to an already powerful system

Thank You, Mr. Zimmer.

That sounds great. I had the opposite happen over the holidays. had a patient fly in from out of town to get 8 and 9 done. I took biocopy images and proceeded to prep. When I went to take my prep images of the upper jaw, the computer started trying to match up the two images half way through the impression taking before I got #9 imaged. Then the whole thing crashed and I lost my biocopy images. Lesson learned. Always save images.

Problem as I see it. Sirona has a problem. (may need more ram) and I miss the arrow that tells the computer to start the correlation process. I also want to see something that tells me it is "thinking"

Any comments?

Pete, good thought provoking post as usual. The 4.0 software gives us much more power and flexibility than before.
Robert, a ghost image of a " thinking " spinning wheel is in the bottom left of the screen.
It is kind of hidden and took me a while to notice.