The Importance of Using Surgical Guide Stents

Hi, I’m Dr. Todd Shatkin and welcome to this Monday Morning Minute. Today I want to speak to you about the importance of using surgical guide stents and proper preoperative planning for your mini implant cases. It is paramount to have proper planning, and the only way to do that is to thoroughly review the X-rays, the models, and plan exactly where you want to place the implant glance. The very best way to do that is by using a surgical guide with a 3D surgical CBCT stent.

The way to get a surgical stent, a 3D surgical stent, is you have to take a cone beam CT scan of the patient. If you don’t have a cone beam in your office, you can either send the patient out to get one, have a mobile CT company come to your office, or to the patient’s home to take one, or you can purchase a cone CT for your office. Of course, Shatkin F.I.R.S.T.® Sells, I feel, the very best of cone CT’s, the Papaya 3D machine, which I use every day, dozens of times a day. I really don’t think I could go back to a panoramic X ray after having cone for the past eight years in my office. It is just phenomenal the amount of information you get from a good quality CBCT scan.

So if you take that CBCT scan and you send it in to Shatkin F.I.R.S.T.®, we will then take your models, your cone scan, and merge those together to make a digital model and be able to place the implants in that digital model here in our laboratory. From that, we will print a 3D model on the 3D printer and then fabricate a surgical guide stent over that 3D model that looks something like this. And we can do it from anywhere from one tooth to a whole arch of teeth for an upper denture stabilization or a lower denture stabilization or a roundhouse bridge. And by doing that, we’re also able to fabricate a restoration that would go on the patient’s mouth on top of the implants in a precise preplanned position, whether it’s a single tooth, multiple teeth, a denture, or a bridge. And in rare cases, we might even do a roundhouse bridge in one visit using a surgical guide stent with ten to twelve implants.

But usually we make a temporary bridge to place at that time so that you can put the implants in, take your final impression, and then make your final bridge. These are all the reasons why you should use a surgical guide when placing mini implants. But most importantly, medical, legally, you’ve got a pre planning done with a surgical guide stent. If you ever run to any issues at all, you’ve gone through the proper process and due diligence to treat that patient, and you want to document all that, and you want to keep the surgical guide stent with a patient’s name on it in a sealed bag so that you never lose it. And you keep it as part of the patient’s models and records, at least for the minimal amount of time that your state requires you to keep your records in New York State at seven years. So I hope this information was helpful to you, and I look forward to talking to you next Monday on the Monday Morning Minute. Thanks for joining me.