Digital Dental Imaging Software Explained

Digital Dental Imaging Software Explained

In the past, dentists' offices had film-based radiography equipment that required a darkroom to process images. With the dawn of digital dental imaging tools (and their accompanying software systems), many providers have realized the old method is a time-consuming and ineffective way to use practice resources.

Digital imaging practices don't require a darkroom. They can use sensors, pans or intraoral cameras instead. There's no need for chemical processing, as the images from these devices are immediately generated and accessible via computer.

Here are some of the advantages of digital imaging as described by a study published in the Journal of the American Dental Association (JADA):

• Immediate image production
• Display on interactive monitor with ability to magnify image details and take direct measurements
• Perfect radiographic duplicates for referral purposes
• Security mechanisms to identify original images and differentiate them from altered images
• The ability to tag information such as a patient identifier, date of exposure and other relevant details

These benefits are being embraced by many practices. In a Software Advice report of dental software buyer trends, we discovered the greatest amount of dental professionals (18 percent) specifically cite imaging device and/or digital sensor integration as their top-requested software functionality.