The Tech Behind the Results

Remember the trays full of goopy impression material that made you gag? We don’t use those anymore. Instead, we use a small handheld scanner to take a precise digital model of your teeth in just a few minutes. It’s comfortable, it’s fast, and the accuracy is exceptional. That digital model becomes the starting point for everything we design and fabricate in our office, and it feeds directly into our software and our equipment without any manual steps in between.

Exocad is the gold standard in dental design software, the same platform used by the world's most advanced dental laboratories to handle their most complex cases. At Roots Dental, it's the design engine behind everything we fabricate in-house. A single crown, a full set of veneers, implant restorations, complete dentures, full mouth rehabilitations — if we're building it, we're designing it in Exocad first.

Dr. Amy uses it to plan every restoration to exact specifications before treatment begins. For cosmetic cases, you see a digital preview of your new smile before anything is touched. For complex restorative cases, every piece of the treatment plan is designed as a cohesive whole rather than in isolation. By the time we move to fabrication, the result has already been planned, refined, and approved — which means fewer surprises and a final result that reflects exactly what you and Dr. Amy agreed on from the start.

The Midas is a next-generation chairside printer that uses a breakthrough process to fabricate 3D printed restorations right here in the operatory. This is the technology behind our same-day onlays and the beautiful 3D printed veneers that many of our patients choose as an alternative to traditional porcelain. The materials are strong, highly translucent, and can be printed ultrathin, making them a genuinely high-quality restoration rather than a temporary fix. For patients, the practical benefit is simple: less time in the chair, fewer appointments, and no waiting on an outside lab.

Our Pro 2 printer handles a wide range of appliances that make your care more comfortable and more precise. Nightguards, retainers, and surgical guides are all fabricated in-house with accuracy that off-the-shelf options simply can’t match. For patients going through a smile transformation, the Pro 2 is also how we create your smile trial, a physical mockup of your proposed new smile that you can actually see and feel in your mouth before any permanent work is done. That try-before-you-commit experience is something most patients have never had access to before, and it completely changes how confident people feel going into treatment.

Our milling machine is the same class of equipment used in professional dental laboratories, sitting right here in our office. When Dr. Amy designs a crown, onlay, or inlay in our software, that design goes directly to the mill, which carves your restoration from a solid block of ceramic or composite material with extraordinary precision. These restorations feel natural from day one and require minimal adjustment. For patients, this is what makes a same-day crown possible at Roots Dental without sacrificing the quality you’d expect from a laboratory-made restoration.

It's well-known that informed patients who understand their oral health needs tend to experience fewer dental problems overall. At Roots Dental, we believe strongly in patient education, and technology like intraoral cameras allow us to show—rather than simply tell—them what's happening with their oral health.

An intraoral camera is a small handheld imaging device that Dr. Amy uses during dental exams and when diagnosing conditions. The camera is attached to software that displays live, magnified images on your chairside monitor as she moves the device around your mouth. 

This technology benefits us because we can see greater detail than visual examination. Dr. Amy easily spots cracked or broken teeth, dental wear, broken tooth fillings, and decay. We can save still images to your patient record for future reference and show you before and after pictures of your dental treatment.

Having up-to-date dental x-rays for each patient is an essential part of monitoring their oral health needs. At Roots Dental, we use low-dose digital x-rays, which are a huge advancement in dental technology because they emit as much as 80 percent less radiation than film x-rays.

Digital dental x-rays allow our dentist to see tiny spots of decay and other issues and treat them before they become more significant problems. Treating dental problems early on minimizes the need for more invasive procedures, spares you unnecessary discomfort, and saves you time and money on dental costs.

Another benefit of modern dental x-rays is the ability to share the images with you, so you see what our dentist sees. With digital images, Dr. Amy can enlarge, zoom in, and rotate them to give you a clear view of the problem.

If she recommends a procedure, you will have all the information you need to make a confident decision about your treatment.

When scanning, design, printing, and milling all happen in one place under one doctor, something important changes: accountability. Dr. Amy doesn’t hand your case off and hope for the best. She designs it, fabricates it, and places it herself. Every step is connected, every decision is intentional, and the result reflects the full scope of her training, her technology, and her standards. That’s what an in-house digital workflow actually means for the person in the chair.