We here at Cornerstone Dental were eager for May to arrive and bring a great change to our practice – no longer would we take boring ‘ole xrays on patients, we would take a full three dimensional scan!  So the staff was eager to see it and understand what it would mean for them and our patients and the doctors were eager to bring the latest and greatest in digital technology to the practice.  At training day everyone was in awe.  We were only the second office in the region to have this unit, the Galileos Comfort Plus, and it was going to open up our world.  Together we learned the scan unit actually takes 500 individual slices on every patient and the software layers them together, that is a big change from our classic panoramic that took 1 flat picture of the patient.  What does this mean for us?  It means a tremendous increase in data on every patient – we can analyze the entire mouth from three directions – top to bottom, front to back, and left to right.  What will this tell us?  It will help us diagnose more fully, see more in depth, discover infection well before it would show up on a classic panoramic, map landmarks and nerves to aid in planning for dental implants and detect abnormalities we otherwise would not be able to see.  In one phrase: It will open up our field of view.  Next time you’re in ask one of the staff about it and you will see the amazement in their eyes.  We have had such fun this past month learning the ropes of this new technology and we cannot wait to share its unbelievable capability with you.