Dental News - Radiosurgery saves time for patients, dentists

Robin Goodman, DTA

Wed. 23 December 2009

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Radiosurgery is the modality that allows a dentist to perform minimally invasive as well as more invasive surgery on patients without pain. It eliminates the need for a scalpel and a laser. Surgery is accomplished in a more efficient way and allows you to save the patient time and money.

For example, some of the procedures radiosurgery accomplishes allow the patient to make fewer trips to your office and avoid a trip to a specialist. Dental Tribune spoke to Dr John Brescia, a family and cosmetic dentist from Ellman International, at the recent Greater New York Dental Meeting to get more details about radiosurgery and the equipment the company offers.

Which procedures can you perform with a radiosurgery unit?
There is quite a list: gingivectomy, gingivaplasty, biopsy, frenectomy, exposing implants, crown and bridge troughing, operculectomy and removing redundant tissue around simple restorations. You can also bleach teeth using radiosurgery, which is similar to using a laser, but it’s a simpler, quicker and much more cost-efficient way to render periodontal services to your patients.

What specific radiosurgery units does Ellman offer?
We have three main units at this show. There is the basic, entry-level machine that does a very good job for a large majority of practitioners. It’s called the 90 FFP. This machine operates at 3.8 MHz, which allows you to do cosmetic, periodontal and oral surgery with this unit.

We also have a new solid-state machine, the Radiolase II, which offers the ability to cut at 4 MHz. That is the highest frequency that any radiosurgical device or electric surgical device operates at. Most of the other machines available operate under 3 MHz, and those machines tend to be more traumatic in that they deliver too much heat.

Thus, by operating at 3.8 to 4 MHz, you are able to operate with much more precision and much less thermal damage. So it’s minimally invasive, and it allows you to have excellent surgical results with little trauma to the patient.

This unit offers both monopolar, traditional cutting, and bipolar coagulation. You get two different modalities to operate in, and it’s basically a scaled-down version of the next machine.

The last machine is a dual-frequency machine that is hospital-grade and is used by neurosurgeons and oral, maxillofacial and plastic surgeons as well as ENT and family practice doctors. So it’s used throughout dentistry and medicine.

The dual machine allows you to operate on two different frequencies: 4 MHz and, using its step-down feature, you can go to 1.7 MHz. At the lower frequency, you’re able to generate a little more heat so when you are doing some extensive oral surgery or medical procedures where there is more bleeding, you are able to control that bleeding by using the lower frequency. So this is the top-of-the-line machine.

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