The facebow goes digital

Great smile design! Artfully crafted ceramic! Canted results. It’s happened to the best of us. You take the bite impression & the symmetry bite, work with a facebow, send everything off to the lab and cross your fingers it comes back as you intended it. Unless you ship your patient off to the lab, final results may vary.

The digital era has brought countless advances to cosmetic dentistry. Today we introduce the digital facebow. Using a facial picture of your patient you can now eliminate uncomfortable and cumbersome traditional facebows.

Placing the digital facebow at the tip of the centrals and centered with the dental midline you can align your smile simulation with either the long axis of the face or the lip line. Because every patient is different, you will determine which axis to align your case simulation with to most enhance the beauty of your patients smile. Once you have worked out the best smile simulation, using your patient’s facial tissues, the file can be sent to the lab.

Encoded in the file are the M lines. The M lines are calibrated with measurements taken directly on the patient or on the model. This will allow accurate future measurements to be taken from the 2D picture and translated in 3D on the articulator. The Y axis of each tooth is parallel to the Long axis of the face or perpendicular to the smile line. A template is printed and positioned on the articulator. The centrals sit on the X axis provided by the template. The Yaw is achieved by the dental technician using the position of the pre-op model and each Y axis of the M lines. Once the X and Y axes are locked into place the pitch is determined. Using the Calibrated picture the dental technician can extract measurements to achieve the correct pitch.

Short of placing your patient on the articulator, the digital facebow is the most accurate, high precision system out there. Achieving the results you envisioned is now easier than ever.

The digital facebow and the M lines are patent pending by Dental GPS.