Dental aesthetics in the digital era

If the shape of the teeth, their alignment, their size, make it possible to have a beautiful smile, the color and translucency play an essential role. To meet this challenge, Borea has created the Rayplicker, a connected dental shade-taking device. Julien Guillot, its co-founder, explains.

Dental aesthetics is an art. It consists for dentists and prosthetists to implement measurement and realization techniques (dental bleaching, veneers, prostheses…), which allow patients to (re)find a harmonious smile. Sensitive to this aspect of dentistry, Julien Guillot, a doctor in optics, and Frederik Rougier, a dental surgeon, decided to create, in 2013, the company Borea, based in Limoges and which now has about twenty employees.

The color challenge

Their idea: to offer dental surgeons and laboratories a solution for dental shade-taking. "With our team of engineers specialized in optics, image processing, colorimetry and software development, we have developed an innovative tool. Reliable and precise, it measures the color and translucency of teeth, in order to meet the requirements of aesthetic dentistry," said Julien Guillot. Indeed, measuring the color of a natural tooth in the dental office is always a challenge for dentists and dental technicians, and for years, many have been waiting for a reliable and objective solution to measure the shade and translucency of teeth and propose aesthetic dental prostheses that fit perfectly in the mouth.

A 100 % digital workflow

The Rayplicker consists of a digital shade guide, software and a mobile application "Rayplicker Pics App Solution" that allows the processing and transfer of data between the dentist's office and the prosthetist's laboratory. "From the beginning, we wanted a fully digital solution, both for the quality of the measurement, but also to facilitate communication between the actors of dentistry and guarantee the reliability and traceability of the data," said the co-founder of the company. The Rayplicker solution makes it possible to obtain in a single acquisition all the colorimetric information necessary for the aesthetic integration of the ordered prosthesis. With each acquisition, the user can visualize the shade of the tooth under different segmentations: polarized image, general shade, 3-zone mapping, 9-zone mapping, detailed mapping and translucency of the tooth. Borea's device has a patented optical measuring head that eliminates all external influences and its ergonomics allows it to scan up to the premolars.

A very complementary tool

According to Julien Guillot, the Rayplicker is a perfect response to market demand and benefits from the growth of digital dentistry, particularly intra-oral scanners for taking impressions. Together, they form a very complementary duo. "The integration of the Rayplicker with an intra-oral scanner improves diagnosis and clinical intervention, facilitates communication with patients, enables all-digital design and fabrication of dental prostheses, and archives clinical care and diagnosis," Guillot further explained. Thanks to the various digital tools, the patient can preview and visualize the entire treatment administered, benefiting from faster and more precise care techniques, while obtaining a better result by reducing costs.

Interview published in the January 2021 issue of Dental Technologies and Innovations.