3D Printed Surgical Guides Save a Patient

Dental surgical guides are widely renowned for their ease of use. Because everything is flawlessly contoured and drilled to provide “paint by numbers” dental surgery, these guides are a tremendous boon to dental surgeons who want to avoid errors.

But the applications of these clever devices go beyond dental implantology. Recently a slightly different set of surgical guides played a starring role in a complex surgery procedure that has captured headlines around the world.

A firefighter recently received the world’s first successful face transplant, thanks in no small part to some advanced software modeling and the accuracy of 3D printing. As one account puts it:

[The] medical modeling team received the donor scans at the same time Hardison was contacted for surgery. The team in Colorado prepared and couriered the surgical guides to the hospital in New York in just a few hours.

Obviously a face transplant is considerably more risky and involved than dental implant surgery, but that’s just the point: the very fact that this technology is safe enough for a procedure of this magnitude is a good indication that it can easily replace missing teeth.

Our surgical guides for dental implantology are made using the same process and materials as the guides in this news item. They offer stable, sterile polymer construction and are designed to stay rigidly fixed during oral surgery. To learn more, please contact the LA surgical guide pros at Scan Implant Guide here today.