In this week's clinical tip, courtesy of CDOCS, Dr. Farhad Boltchi discusses guided bone profiling, something that may need to be done in your practice when a patient presents for dental implants.
Video transcript
"This is Dr. Farhad Boltchi with CDOCS. And in this tip of the day video, I will be discussing guided bone profiling.
"Now bone profiling becomes necessary in a lot of cases where we place implants and the implants end up subcrestally. Usually, this is the case interproximally or on the lingual or palatal surfaces.
"In order to ensure that our restorative components, such as abutments and tie bases, impression copings, scan bodies, and so forth seat without impinging upon the bone, we need to remove the bone. Now, traditionally, this is done manually with burs. However, that risks hitting the shoulder of the implant and thereby damaging the implant, and it's not as precise.
"Therefore, we have developed, or there has been developed, these guided bone-profiling kits. This is the one for the Astra EV system that is illustrated here, with specific pins that go into the implant and profilers that are then guided by this pin to very accurately remove the necessary bone around the implant without damaging the shoulder of the implant.
"So here in this picture, you can see on the left, the pin that goes inside of the implant. And then on the right, you can see the corresponding profiler that follows this pin to very accurately remove the bone. So in this series of pictures, we can appreciate that the pin is screwed into the implant and has an rpm of 300. We very gently use the bone profiler, or in this case, with this system, it's called the bone reamer, to remove the bone around the shoulder of the implant very precisely so that we have enough space to seat our restorative components. Now we can then use a round bur to very gently smoothe the bone in if there are any sharp edges and then place the transmucosal healing cap and suture. So this is a very elegant way to remove bone that would be in the way and not let restorative components seat.
"So, I hope this tip of the day has been helpful, and for more tips and discussions on topics such as this, please visit CDOCS.com, or visit one of our implant workshops, which we teach at CDOCS and where we go in great detail into topics such as this and other similar topics."
