We're very proud of the fact that we have worked with many pro active surgeons, which has allowed us to become known as a cutting edge CAD/CAM dental laboratory, with all the benefits this brings to our surgeons and their patients.
Over the years we have been involved in many Beta trials with some of the worlds biggest dental companies, which has given us a great insight into some of the benefits and potential weak points in some of the current materials and systems available today. The companies that we work on the Beta testing with are looking to overcome any potential weak points they see and improve the restorative options by heavily investing in research, and testing using the latest materials and technology.
For us as a laboratory one of the biggest leaps forward was definitely the use of CAD/CAM systems such as Atlantis and Isus to produce our titanium, chrome and zirconia sub structures (and even whole crowns in some case) as this allowed us to move away from some of the inconsistency, inaccuracy and wasted expense that the old traditional wax and cast or manual milling methods had.
But recently we have seen a very exciting shift away from focussing on the machining of the custom component parts and sub structures, and a focus on the materials which we use to deliver the final prosthesis to our patients.
What's wrong with what we have?
Realistically with many cases there's absolutely nothing wrong with the Porcelain, composite or acrylics we have successfully used for many years to restore our implant cases, but if we have an implant restoration on a posterior tooth where the patient has shown a history of destroying restorations then maybe we can look to the new hybrid materials that are now available? These mix the higher aesthetics we want from ceramics with the qualities that we would ideally want on an implant restoration such as shock absorbency and chip resistance.
Shock absorbency
One of the main characteristics of new Hybrid ceramics like Vita Enamic or 3M ultimate is the fact that they actually absorb shock from the opposing dentition.
Chip resistance
Due to the fact that these materials are produced using CAD/CAM technology, they are a monolithic structure which greatly reduces the risk of delamination, further more these new engineered materials have been specifically designed to prevent crack propagation as shown in this pdf
Thanks to our knowledge of CAD/CAM and depth of experience in using this with the new materials such as Visio.lign (which we use on full arch cases) and Vita Enamic we have been able to produce a screw retained CAD/CAM Hybrid Ceramic crown that offers the benefits mentioned above.
Below is a Vita enamic screw retained crown which has been milled and is awaiting final staining.
Further to being an ideal posterior restoration, this crown is also vastly more cost effective than a traditional screw retained ceramic layered implant crown (although if you do prefer ceramic for the very best aesthetics, we can now produce ceramic bonded to titanium implant crowns for maximum biocompatibility)
Thanks to our partnership with Atlantis we are also able to offer a restoration that has a custom titanium contour against the tissue and then transitions to these new Hybrid Ceramics in the rest of the screw retained crown restoration, think of it as a custom link abutment +
This is not a one size fits all solution, in fact we still produce many porcelain bonded screw retained units where aesthetics are absolutely critical, but it's always great to have another solution that we can mix and match into our restorative toolkit when we are looking at the needs of our patients.
We have used monolithic crowns on cement retained restorations for many years, starting initially with full zirconia and then moving on to the new Hybrid Ceramics such as Vita Enamic purely because of the improvements in aesthetics and functionality they offer.
No patient you see is exactly the same, which is why we want to ensure we have the widest range of restorative solutions available to match their specific restorative requirements.
These materials can be used for cement retained, screw retained or even angle corrected screw retained implant cases. We have more information on both of these over on our website