Radiation-Free X-Rays

What a beautiful view there. Some patients worry that x-rays aren't safe since radiation exposure has been linked to cell mutations that could even lead to cancer.

Now, Melissa talked to a doctor about some new state of the art technology that is free of radiation at the dentist office.

Our viewer, Sammy tells me she's unfortunately had to have a lot of x-ray's in her lifetime and she's concerned about getting even more, especially at the dentist. Do you have a suggestion for someone who's in a situation like this?

We have DEXIS CariVu, which I'm really excited about. It has no radiation at all. It's an infrared translumination device, basically a high definition camera, painless, no radiation. We can take a quick picture, comes on the screen instantly and we can actually see not only where two dimensionally, like it is on xrays, but three-dimensionally the location of each individual cavity-

Why don't you show us how it works and just a thought the thought that you don't have radiation is huge for, I'm sure, a lot of patients who are reading more and more about it.

So this is the device, it's called the DEXIS CariVu. There's two different sizes, we got one and two. And basically we just have our patient open her mouth for us, then we place it right on the tooth.

And then you get an instant picture of what's going on and you can see decay with that?

Yes ma'am.

It's that fast.

Luckily Becky has no decay, so we're not going to see anything.

I see not to worry about that. Now let's talk about... So right there you see, and you would be able to tell if there's a cavity or a cracked tooth?

Exactly. So there's a picture of a healthy tooth.

All right, and then let's talk about for people who have to get perhaps a whole lot of dental work. Sometimes it can be frustrating because your bite gets off a little bit, but you also have something electronic and high tech, so to speak, that's really helping out with that as well.

Yeah, this is called the Tech-scan or T-scan, the dental device for short. Basically, if you look on the monitor here, we have digitally a representation of our patient's bite. And what you'll do is we'll put it in her mouth and she's going to bite on it. And when she bites, it's going to compress on the sensor. And when that compresses, you'll see each active point in the mouth and it tells us exactly where she's biting, how hard and where we need to adjust. Go ahead and bite for me and then slide your jaw to the right. Slide your jaw to the left. So as she's biting, we're able to detect the bite pressure per square inch.

People are probably used to the chomp, chomp on the different colored paper, right?

Exactly.

But this takes a little more of the guesswork out, doesn't it?

Definitely.

Interesting, huh?

Really.

I know, good to know.

A camera that can see through the tooth, basically?

Mm-hmm (affirmative), it sees everything in there. No more x-rays. I like the idea of that. Well I not so-