Service 06
3D Cone Beam Imaging.
A conventional dental x-ray squashes a three-dimensional root system into a single flat picture, with the bone and the roots behind it superimposed on top. A cone beam scan does not. It is the single biggest change in endodontic diagnosis in a generation.
How It Works
One rotation, every angle
The scanner makes a single pass around your head — you sit still, nothing touches you, and it takes seconds. From that pass the software reconstructs a three-dimensional volume of the area, which we can then slice in any plane: front to back, side to side, or straight down the axis of a root.
It is not a medical CT scan. The field of view is small — often just a few teeth — and the radiation dose is a small fraction of a hospital CT, comparable to a short-haul flight. We only take one when it will actually change what we do.
What it lets us see
- Extra canals hidden behind other roots on a flat film
- The true size and shape of an infection in the bone
- Vertical root fractures and resorptive defects
- How close a root sits to the sinus or the inferior alveolar nerve
- Curves and calcifications that determine how a canal must be approached
- Whether a lesion belongs to the tooth we suspect, or to its neighbour
Before surgery, it is essential
For microsurgery a scan is not optional. It tells us where the root tip actually lies in three dimensions, how thick the bone over it is, how large the lesion is, and how far the root is from the sinus floor or the nerve canal. Planning that from a flat image means guessing — and we do not guess near a nerve.
Diagnosis before treatment, every time
It is the reason our re-treatment cases so often find something nobody had seen.