The Guide Designer has had a couple of new features added to it. We have introduced an easy way to set the 'offset' for implants & a new Stackable Attachment submenu has also been added to help design multi-levelled implant guides.
Offset
The term 'offset' is generally known as the distance between the top of the implant and the top of the guide sleeve.
There are a few options available for you to set the offset:
1. If you know the length of the drill, just enter the length into the slider bar. This will adjust the drill cylinder accordingly. After the drill length is set, you can snap the guide sleeve to the top of the cylinder. The offset is the drill length less the actual implant length.
2. If you know what offset you require, you can snap the guide sleeve to the top of the implant, as a starting point. By pressing several times on an 'arrow' button in the menu, you can move the guide sleeve incrementally upwards until you reach the desired offset height. Each click will shift the guide sleeve upwards by 0.5mm.
3. If you know the offset - you can just plug in the value into the Z-slider bar.
The photo below shows a 9mm offset value.
We have also introduced a drill visualisation tool. While this drill bit is only a generic representation of a drill, it may help as an additional diagnostic tool.
Once the drill diameter and the offset have been established, a thin spacer in blue is added to the drill cylinder to add a clearance to help the drill spin freely inside the guide sleeve.
Stackable Attachments
The new stackable attachments menu is an amazing addition to the Guide Designer module, and will help you designed those multi-levelled implant guides.
Some of the features include extendable cylinders in front and on the sides of the attachments which are used to connect the attachments on to the primary, secondary and tertiary components. The attachments can be easily duplicated so you can use multiple attachments.
The retention for the clipping mechanism can also be adjusted by either including or excluding the retention ring which sits inside the bracket.
The new updated menu includes a 'video' link button. When pressed a new browser window will open to show additional videos. Some of these include designing a stackable guide, from start to finish. There is also a video on how to complete an implant guide by using a different dicom viewer program like BSB.
If you would like to update your Guide Designer menu to include these new features, you will need to install a new menu. If you need any assistance with this please reach out.