With regard to digital dentistry and the technology available, UofL is very, very fortunate. We have scanners that students are using all the way from their first year in their preclinical courses, their first and second year. Then in their third and fourth year, they are able to use scanners on live patients. They're able to take that scan and work hands-on in the lab and design and mill their own crowns in order to do same-day crowns if necessary.
A lot of dentistry now is digital, like digital crowns. All that stuff is very up and coming and always changing and innovating. So it's good to start and at least see some of that in dental school.
Students get really excited to learn new techniques that simplify and increase or improve the overall outcome of the patient.
So with Digital Dentistry, we're able actually to visualize the final end result for a patient before we even start to allow them to understand their whole treatment plan and all the options that we have for them.
You can design the restorations in a software where you can see the preparation in a better scale, a bigger scale. And that way you can look into details. And later on, when the restorations are fabricated, they are made by a computer instead of traditional manual techniques.
You actually get to work with crown fabrication via CAD/CAM software in your first two years of dental school. A lot of dental programs you don't even get to scan until you get up into the clinic. Some programs still don't even have scanning devices to integrate that into the clinical level.
With printing technology, that is added to manufacturing, while milling is subtractive. So here at UofL, we actually have capability to do both, and the students have opportunities to see, design, and print and mill all their own materials.
I think that will give me a leg up and a step forward because I get hands-on practice with these things. I will not be confused by this new equipment, this up and coming age of dentistry. I can instead embrace that and go in with full confidence that I know how to use it and know how to work it.
I consider us very fortunate that we're getting to experience the forefront of dental technology that's currently out in the field today, but also lean back on some fundamentals that have previously been taught.
