Tightie Whities: CEREC 3D Printed Whitening Trays!

 

 

Here is a cool way to go impression free on something we do a lot in the dental office, teeth whitening!  From a lab work perspective this really doesn’t take much time, when you count pouring up models, applying block out resin etc.  I scanned the upper and lower arch and exported to inLab which Frankie converted for me to STL.  Imported the models into meshmixer and cleaned up any holes and placed a base.

In Meshmixer under the select function make the brush fairly large, you can go over areas that you over selected by hitting ctrl and the left mouse button. After each tooth go to extrude and type in 1mm and hit enter.  The perfect amount of reservoir for your whitening gel will appear. Click accept and “clear selection” after every tooth. You can select each tooth and extrude all as a hole, but I found if I clicked wrong it would deselect all my work. This shouldn’t take more than a few minutes per arch.  Export each model as an STL.

Going to play around with some model free prints or printing flat on the base, but after a few failed prints I still use supports.  Use the vacuform as you would with a stone model.

Just like everything in CEREC a good scan makes for a good fit. Could you do this with alginate and stone?  Sure but it wouldn’t be as fun!