Same Day Onlays Crowns - Softouch Dental

At SofTouch Dental you can receive a ceramic crown, overlay, onlay, and/or veneer in a single visit. This is made possible by our Cerec. Cerec is type of CAD-CAM system. CAD-CAM has been around in dentistry for a few decades now, and has gotten better every year. The traditional way of receiving a permanent ceramic restoration takes two visits. At the first visit, the damage to the tooth is removed and the tooth is prepared and finalized for the type of restoration it will receive: at our practice they are minimally invasive partial coverage restorations such as overlays, onlays, and veneers – the only time we typically do crowns is when we are replacing them.

Once the tooth has been finalized and prepared an impression would be take. This would involve using a wet-‘goopy’ material in an impression tray placed in the mouth over the prepared tooth. Once set, this impression is taken out of the mouth and sent to the dental laboratory. Meanwhile, a temporary restoration would be placed in the patients mouth until the restoration was completed at the lab and sent back to the office. This often takes 2-3 weeks. The patient would then come back, have the temporary removed and the final restoration placed.

With the Cerec system, there is no wet impression or temporary and patients can receive their permanent ceramic restoration same day. After preparing and finalizing the tooth an optical impression is taken with a scanner. A scanner is essentially a video camera that reproduces a highly accurate 3-D model on a computer. Instead of being sent to the lab, the dentist designs the permanent restoration chair side. Once the design is finished, it is sent to a “mill” in another part of the office. The mill acts similarly to a CNC machine. It grinds out the restoration design from a solid block of ceramic. The ceramic block is often not in the final hardest state so that it is easier to grind/carve the ceramic into the desired shape. When the mill is finished, the restoration is glazed and characterized, much like pottery, and then put in a high temperature oven to glaze and harden the ceramic. After the firing, the restoration is cooled and processed for delivery to the patients mouth. Since the process is accomplished in the office in the same visit a temporary is not required.