Our Technology
iTero
Nobody misses the impression tray. For years, getting a model of a child’s teeth meant a mouthful of putty, several minutes of sitting perfectly still, and a fair chance of having to do the whole thing again because someone moved. The iTero scanner replaces all of it with a small wand that passes over the teeth and builds an exact digital model in a few minutes. There is nothing to gag on, nothing setting against the back of the throat, and no second attempt. For children who are anxious about dental visits, and for the ones with a sensitive gag reflex who have dreaded this part their whole lives, it removes the single worst moment of the appointment.
What surprises most parents is that the scan is the most useful thing on the screen that day. The model builds in real time as Dr. Dhol works, so within a few minutes he can rotate your child’s bite, zoom in on the crowding you have been worrying about since the permanent teeth came in, and show you exactly what he is seeing rather than describe it while you nod along. Families considering Invisalign get a further step: the same scan generates a simulation of where the teeth could reasonably end up, so you are looking at a projected result before you have committed to a single appointment. The scan is also shared easily with your family dentist, which keeps everyone working from the same information.
3D Scanners
A scan does not stop being useful once the appointment ends. Every model your child produces here is stored digitally and kept, which means we can lay this year’s scan over last year’s and see precisely how the teeth and jaws have moved in the months between. During early treatment that comparison is close to the whole game. It tells Dr. Dhol whether growth is tracking the way he predicted, whether room is opening up where he expected it to, and whether the plan needs adjusting now rather than at the end. It also gives you something concrete to look at, because progress over six months is genuinely hard to see in the mirror at the bathroom sink.
The practical benefits show up throughout treatment. Aligners and retainers are fabricated from exact digital data rather than a physical mould that can warp, shrink or chip on the way to the lab, so the appliance that arrives fits the way it was designed to. If a retainer is lost on a school trip or a dog finds it, we can produce a replacement from the file already on record instead of bringing your child in to start the process over. And when another provider needs the records, whether that is your family dentist, an oral surgeon or a specialist you are seeing for a second opinion, the file goes to them directly without another appointment or another set of impressions.
Dental Monitoring
Teeth move at the speed of biology rather than the speed of the appointment calendar, which is why the traditional six-week check-in has always been a compromise. It is too frequent when everything is going well and too slow when it is not. DentalMonitoring closes that gap. Every week or two, your child scans their own teeth with a phone; the images are analyzed automatically, and anything that looks off is flagged for Dr. Dhol to review. The scan takes a couple of minutes at the kitchen table, and most teenagers get the hang of it faster than their parents do.
The result is that problems surface in days rather than at the next visit. If an aligner is not seating fully, if a bracket has come loose, if a tooth is moving slower than the plan assumed, or if hygiene is slipping in a way that will cause trouble later, we know while it is still a small correction. It also works in the other direction: when everything is tracking properly, there is no reason to make a family drive in to confirm it, so appointments get spaced further apart. Over a two-year course of treatment, that adds up to a meaningful number of missed school mornings and afternoons off work that never had to happen, particularly for families coming from outside South Surrey.
CBCT
A standard dental X-ray takes a three-dimensional problem and flattens it into a single image, with structures overlapping each other in ways that hide as much as they reveal. Our cone beam scanner captures the whole architecture instead. Dr. Dhol can see how the upper and lower jaws sit in relation to one another, exactly where unerupted teeth are positioned within the bone and which direction they are traveling, how much bone is available to move teeth into, the condition of the jaw joints, and how the sinuses and nasal passages have formed. For a child whose face is still developing, that depth of information is the difference between guiding growth deliberately and reacting to whatever has already happened.
It changes real decisions. An impacted canine heading toward the root of a neighboring tooth is nearly invisible on a flat film and obvious in three dimensions, and catching it early can mean guiding the tooth into place rather than losing a healthy one to damage. The same is true of asymmetries and jaw relationships that a conventional X-ray simply cannot show. Parents reasonably ask about radiation, so here is the straight answer: the scan takes well under a minute, delivers a small fraction of the dose of a medical CT, and we take one only when there is a clear clinical reason that will actually change the treatment plan. When a standard X-ray answers the question, that is what we use.