Best of Class Winners in Practice: 3Shape's TRIOS 4

3Shape's TRIOS 4 intraoral scanner

Dr. Naren Rajan, founder of Dentistry of Mendham, assistant director of Digital Dentistry at the Touro College of Dental Medicine, and faculty at CADpro Academy in Woodbury, New York, shares his experiences with 3Shape's TRIOS 4 intraoral scanner.

DPR: Tell us a bit about you and your practice.

Naren Rajan, DMD

Dr. Rajan: I’m a general practitioner in northern New Jersey. I’ve been in private practice for 17 years.

DPR: How did you learn about the TRIOS 4?

Dr. Rajan: I did same-day CAD/CAM with a different system for a couple of years, and ultimately wasn’t really satisfied with the results we were getting. I went back to analog for a period of five years or so and then decided to look back into the different changes in digital technology were. I settled on getting a 3Shape scanner at that time—the TRIOS 2.

DPR: What made you start using the TRIOS in your practice?

Dr. Rajan: All of my labs were already using 3Shape CAD design and scanners. So, it was kind of a very easy transition and kind of an obvious choice to use their technology on the clinical side because there are some unique benefits of being able to communicate with the laboratory and the 3Shape native file format between our practice and the laboratory. A few of the particular improvements with the TRIOS 4 are its diagnostic capabilities—which are not yet available in the United States are not yet approved by the FDA. So, we got the TRIOS 4 to anticipate when the diagnostic capabilities become available in the United States so that we can use intraoral scanning to maybe reduce the overall amount of radiographs that we're taking in the practice. There's a transillumination tip that can be put on that can apparently help diagnose interproximal caries and also to detect surface caries.

DPR: What has it been like using the TRIOS 4?

Dr. Rajan: I like it because it's much lighter than the TRIOS 2. The tips heat up much faster using something called a Smart Tip. The tip itself has an anti-fogging feature so you don’t get fog on your mirror. And the TRIOS 4 has built-in electronics into the tip that not only heat the tip faster, but also track the tip’s usage, and the software will tell you when it’s time to change the tip.

DPR: How has using the TRIOS 4 benefited your practice and your patients?

Dr. Rajan: Even though we don't mill in the office, the preparation and impression procedure is shorter than it ever was before. It's possible now that we can see the patients the same week we get a digital impression, we produce the restoration without a model, and they come back into our office, in 2 days, many times, actually. It's made treatment immensely more efficient, more comfortable, more predictable, and it's repeatable, as well. We intraoral scan at every new patient visit as part of our new patient protocol. And we've just been able to communicate with patients what's happening in their mouth in a much more transparent manner by showing those scans. That allows us to interact with them on a level that was completely different than trying to show them radiographs or, maybe show the little small photographs taken by the intraoral camera. The conversations were not as impactful.