SoftSmile Treatment Planner: Simply Beautiful

Beauty is a subjective matter. Yet, the beauty of a product, literature, art, or even software is a manifestation of how much talent, time, and effort was involved in preparing something concise, elegant and, simply wonderful.

When the SoftSmile team was contemplating the development of an advanced and automated treatment planner, we aspired to create a pure masterpiece of engineering and aesthetics. The beauty of the interface would be a fundamental element, which is rarely attributed to medical devices. 

We believe that doctors who dedicate their lives to perfecting smiles, and their patients who are willing to wear aligners or braces for their treatment, deserve to have a treatment planning platform that ensures absolute precision, as well as comfort and ease with the software and all of its features. 

SoftSmile created a dental treatment planning software solution, Vision, with astonishingly perfect visualizations of the teeth, gingiva, roots, and jaw. More importantly, we made all those elements interact seamlessly with the underlying algorithms. 

It is often unclear how this level of beauty and detailed visualization is achieved. In our particular case, this level of visualization was accomplished via the enormous efforts and talent of our designers and engineers. Building an aesthetically pleasing orthodontic treatment planner is no trivial task. 

Theoretically, we could have just made beautiful cartoons. But, in our industry precision is the cornerstone of any treatment.  Even a simple 1° mistake could lead to 5 mm discrepancy in teeth positioning. We understand the importance of precision to doctors and patients, so we made sure that the beauty of the software interface mirrored the exact properties of the teeth, roots and gingiva. The task was to connect aesthetic beauty with absolute accuracy.

Numerous independent tests and our own simulations prove that we have achieved our goal of combining stunning beauty with mathematical accuracy. While a doctor operates with aesthetically perfect pictures, intricate algorithms correlate each particular point on the screen into math models which are a basis for the models prepared for printing.

How did we achieve this?

Once we completed the aesthetic and engineering aspects of our treatment planner, we had to make them correlate perfectly. We needed to arrange a marriage between Science and Art. This proved to be one of the most challenging exercises. Anyone who has dealt with treatment planners knows that the picture on the screen is merely a model. Existing solutions are often unable to guarantee an absolute match between the uploaded patient information and that model created after the design process. This may lead to unsatisfactory treatment results for the patient. Patients may have diligently followed their doctor’s instructions but may end up unhappy with the results due to minor discrepancies during the treatment design. Doctors, patients or even materials are not the culprit of these errors, it is simply an inherent disadvantage of existing software solutions. 

For SoftSmile, and for any practicing doctor, the preservation of the geometry and properties of the teeth, gingiva and roots are absolutely essential. We had to pursue superior aesthetics and accuracy.  

In order to achieve this, we built algorithms that allow an operator to work with aesthetically pleasant objects while remaining confident that any changes or interactions will lead to accurate calculations for further treatment.

Let’s imagine an operator who wants to move a tooth. During this simple interaction an operator affects that particular tooth, adjacent teeth, gingiva and corresponding roots. All of this should happen simultaneously, without delays and most challengingly, preserve the shape and geometry in correspondence to the actual teeth and gingiva. 

As simple as this may sound, this simple task takes myriads of parallel calculations to ensure the entire treatment design adjusts to the change and is ready for printing. Such efficiency is only possible because of the algorithms we introduced into the software. Our algorithms are the magic glue between aesthetics, seamless calculations and absolute accuracy. 

We have built a treatment planner that is fast, precise and pleasant for a user to interact with. Contact us with any questions or to request a demo.