Dental Product Insights: Midmark® Extraoral Imaging System (EOIS)

Video Transcript

EOIS, first I'll tell you that stands for extraoral imaging system, and that's Midmark's new 2D, 3D x-ray system. So this can be purchased as a 3D unit straight out of the box or it can also be a 2D unit that later it can be upgraded to enable 3D imaging. Both the 2D and 3D units can be equipped with a cephalometric option. EOIS was designed to simplify the user experience in taking 3D images, and to provide outstanding image quality at lower x-ray dose.

We also know that space is at a premium and dental offices, so we worked to have the smallest footprint as possible with the unit. EOIS was in development for almost five years. While we had an existing 2D panoramic system, we completely redesigned the electrical and software subsystems to enable 3D imaging in a highly reliable design. Extra time was taken to create our own 3D reconstruction software customized for the geometry of EOIS.

As we went through our development, we made sure to take advantage of the most recent developments in x-ray technology. Our proprietary reconstruction software, and new detectors ensure that EOIS has the highest image quality. The internal verification and validation done on EOIS was our most extensive we've ever done. This directly relates to the high reliability EOIS purchasers can expect.

When we did market research as we started this product development in looking at different offices, we found that many end users especially general practitioners, were intimidated by 3D imaging. And were confused by some of the options that were presented to the operator when taking a scan. They were, what I would call, very engineering oriented, the displays and so on. And so we focused our design to simplify the user interface and to optimize selections for things like voxel size, based on the exam parameters, rather than presenting more confusing selections to the operator.

We feel having an easy to use unit is important with the staff turnover seen in many offices today. Our goal was to allow an untrained user to quickly be able to take your scan with confidence. The simplified controls benefit practices, because we can ensure that there are less retakes and poor images that are taken because of wrong selections made. So it kind of helps the workflow. And that reduces time that's necessary to work patients through to get scans completed. Between our intuitive user interface and the onboard tutorial videos, staff members can almost immediately start taking 3D scans. We've actually observed this at one of our locations where staff member who is not present for our training during installation, walked up to the EOIS spent a few seconds reviewing the interface and its buttons then proceeded to position a patient and take a scan.

While our main design goal was making the unit easy to use, we had to keep our eye on image quality. After all, the purpose of a CBCT unit is to provide images that improve the diagnostic capability of dental office, we felt some manufacturers haven't been focusing too much on dose reduction at the expense of image quality. So we prioritized the image quality while at the same time reducing patient dose where possible. We also utilize proprietary iterative reconstruction software that was first developed in medical CT imaging that allows for lower noise images. So we're able to provide images with smaller voxel sizes than many of our competitors. And smaller voxel sizes directly lead to higher resolution images. What's nice about EOIS, it's really you know, suitable for most all dental practices. You know, both specialists as well as general practitioners with the features that are provided with the unit. It's flexible to provide services to really most dental practices that are looking to have Cone Beam CT imaging to find out more about EOIS go to midmark.com, where there's all sorts of information on all of our dental products.