Custom made CEREC dental restorations

See how we can create crowns for dental implants faster than ever before

If you’ve been thinking about the amount of time it takes to replace your missing tooth with a dental crown or implant, we have great news for you.

We asked our Associate Dentist Dr Nick Yee to take us through the CEREC technology, and demonstrate how it can make custom-designed crowns for implants far more quickly than you imagined.

Missing a tooth? Find out all about your options here

Transcript of our CEREC video:

My name is Dr Nicolas Yee, I am one of the Associate Dentists here at Wickham Terrace Dental. 

Today what we will be featuring is the CEREC crown technology that we have in our practice. This is a very new technology that we have invested a lot of money into, to provide a very high level of patient comfort and minimise the costs for our patients for complex treatments such as crowns and implant retained crowns.

What the CEREC machine does is that it actually has a camera which will convert a 3D rendition of the teeth in your mouth into a 3D full colour model. This eliminates the need for having to take physical impressions which can sometimes be uncomfortable or can lead to inaccuracies in the impression process.

We use the CEREC camera to scan your mouth, and within five minutes we get a very detailed model of your teeth, gums, and jaw. Once the model is completed on the actual computer, which takes about thirty seconds, we then draw an outline on the actual tooth we’re interested in treating. So you can see on this diagram it is this white outline over here. We then go through a few stages and press an auto complete button.

Next, the CEREC machine will go through a series of stock images of other teeth, and then it will adjust it to custom fit to your mouth. Once that is done, it will then give a full proposal that shows us exactly where everything needs to be in terms of how it fits in between your other teeth. 

We can even remove the upper jaw from the model, just to see how the new restoration fits in between, so your crown can fit perfectly into place. Once the actual crowned tooth is in place we can also use a lower jaw model to see how it actually fits. This lets us actually see how the tooth restoration fits together, exactly like a jigsaw puzzle.

Once that’s all done we move along to the CEREC milling stage where the actual tooth restoration will be milled out of a single solid block of porcelain.

This is one of our process blocks that we buy. It is a pressed piece of porcelain which means they are quality tested overseas to ensure there are very very few irregularities, if any. What we do is effectively run them through the CEREC machine, and the image of your new tooth that we had before will actually be 3D milled with this piece of equipment.

This is the CEREC milling machine that will actually mill this porcelain block within about ten minutes. What would generally have taken about two weeks to do by hand will now take just ten minutes by machine.

So you see over here we have two burrs, we have got the left hand side burr (which will cut the inside surface of the tooth) and we have the right hand side burr (which will cut the outside surface of the tooth). Both will work in tandem to create the actual crown. I am going to put this inside the machine and we will run it through and see how it is made.

Now that we are done with polishing up the crown, it’s now ready to insert.

With CEREC what we have effectively done is sped up a process that took about two weeks into about a two-hour time frame.