A Dental CT Scan

When Rachel had her "special tooth" extracted a few weeks ago, our Pediatric dentist was telling me about a new CT machine that her husbands (he's a dentist too!) office had gotten, just that week. It's the latest and greatest in 3D Xray that allows you splice and move and plan out the dental care of patients for example with orthodontics and oral surgery.

A couple of days after our appointment, we received a call from our dentist informing us that if we brought Rachel in within the next two weeks, for them to practice on Rachel, they'd do the scans free of charge. We took advantage of that idea and worked out a time in which everyone was available. That appointment was this morning.

This new machine circles your head and scans it while you stand still. Rachel did perfect! She stood still and bit the stick as best as she could. Within 10-15 minutes, the scans started to download on the nearby computer. The scans were amazing! Mr. Doctor Hoffer sat and spliced through the scans and together with Rachel's dentist, they kinda sorted out what tooth was what. They were very appreciative of me allowing them to use Rachel as it was interesting to them to see all the adult teeth forming within her gums, not to mention the obvious of her issues of having been born with a cleft. He's going to take her scans and consult with a few orthodontists to see what they think and share the technology with them. But it was amazing to see.

It looks like Rachel has all her adult teeth! Her 12 year molars are already growing and she has many adult teeth starting to push their way up on to the baby teeth. You could also see the area where her bone graft was done. It was all very interesting, and I'm thankful for the opportunity for my kid to be used as a guinea pig! :) Click on the picture to enlarge.
They burned the images, as well as the software to a CD which I was able to bring home and have Steven load on to our computer and he could see the scans for himself. This will be helpful to have with Rachel's medical file that I keep.