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The child in the dentist chair is trying to be brave. You ask for a bite and the intraoral scanner starts to hum.

Then the chaos shows up. Saliva pools, the tongue photobombs, a cheek throws a hard shadow, suction misses a beat, and bright glare sneaks in.

Without your new gadget, you would’ve started over, and simply faced the same clutter. The clock keeps moving while the picture gets messier.

You turn to the digital scan, trace a small loop around the obstacles, and the software reformulates only what sits beyond it. The spit, shadow, and tongue slip get cut out so the tooth and gum come back into view.

You finish the scan without a redo and the chair goes quiet again. This week’s patent fixes the messiest dental images, so you can focus on those pearly whites.

This system protects the good parts of dental imagery and refreshes the bad parts. The result in the chair is fewer full rescans and a calmer workflow.

The inventor for this patent was Align Technology, the San Jose-based dental tech company behind Invisalign clear aligners and iTero intraoral scanners. At scale, Align reported $4.0B in FY2024 revenue and has treated over 19.5 million Invisalign patients to date.

How it works:

The dentist’s intraoral scanner grabs a stream of mouth images as they move it. The software spots the tooth outline, like a fence around the prep or natural tooth. It locks the pixels inside that fence as a good set, so a sloppy pass later can’t overwrite that tooth’s image. Everything outside the fence stays editable.

As the dentist keeps scanning, they collect overlap. When a new image covers the same spot as the locked set, the software looks only in that overlap and decides what to keep. It can rank sources by simple cues like sharpness or motion. Then it blends with weights so the cleaner view wins, instead of wiping the whole area.

Before any blend, it lines the pictures up so the same physical point matches across shots. Imagine a situation where it picks a few reliable points on a cusp and along the gum, then nudges the next picture until the points align from a different angle. It uses tiny shifts and tiny rotations to avoid big warps. If a small corner is off, it can line up that patch on its own tile, then move to the next tile, until the set agrees in one 3D view.

When the mess lives inside a locked zone, the dentist can draw a border around the troublesome parts. Inside that border, the system rebuilds the picture using the sharper takes. It removes saliva glare, shadow, and tongue blur so the tooth and gum show up clean again.

Edges get a special fix. If the finish line looks soft or cut off, you trace a border at that edge. The system refreshes the model outside the border with better data while keeping the inside steady, so the tooth edge comes back without a full do-over.

Chairside, the payoff is redo reduction. One bad corner no longer forces a restart. You patch the problem and move on.

And the spillover into other industries is exciting!

In satellite mapping after a storm, many images of the same streets are stitched together. Some tiles are spoiled by clouds, glare, or water sheen. A selective patching approach lets teams keep the stable base map while refreshing only the spoiled tiles with clearer shots from a later pass or a different sensor. Roads, buildings, and lot lines stay aligned. Only the damaged patches change.

Infrastructure inspection faces a similar puzzle. Drone surveys of bridges and tunnels often include frames with sun flare or motion blur. Local replacement allows a sharper frame to drop into the affected panel without reprocessing the entire model. Inspectors keep continuous lines and textures, which makes cracks and corrosion easier to track over time.

In sports replay and VAR, multiple cameras capture the same moment from different angles. A small region around the contact can be rebuilt using the cleanest view while the rest of the field remains untouched. That preserves timing and player positions across angles and reduces confusion from blur or parallax at the key frame.

Clinics adopt what pays back fast. Chair time is the scarce resource. Recent clinical analyses show intraoral scanning can cut chair-side time by up to 20% compared with extraoral digitization, so any avoided rescan is real money and time saved. Fewer redos plus faster captures is a clean incentive for owners and DSOs (dental service organizations that run multi-practice groups and centralize admin). (PubMed)

Remakes are the quiet profit leak. Redoing scans and remaking parts burns time and budget. Even a small drop means fewer second visits, fewer lab re-queues, and smoother schedules. A selective fix only the bad patch workflow should push in the right direction. Less rescanning, fewer model ambiguities, and fewer cases bouncing back from the lab.

Labor shifts next. Fewer full rescans mean assistants spend less time re-positioning and re-drying, and doctors make fewer judgment calls about starting over. On the lab side, lower remake volume frees technician hours for higher-value steps like finishing and quality control. That same logic extends beyond dentistry. When teams can patch the bad tile instead of reprocessing the whole dataset, throughput rises in mapping teams, inspection crews, and replay rooms.

Second-order effects show up in accountability. A record of what was locked, what was replaced, and why becomes a quiet superpower. It helps labs understand what they’re receiving, helps clinicians defend decisions, and gives vendors a feedback loop to refine heuristics. As imaging volumes rise, selective fixes plus clear audit trails tend to beat start over workflows on cost, speed, and trust.

In the U.S., Aspen Dental signed a nationwide deal with 3Shape to supply TRIOS 4 intraoral scanners across nearly 900 locations, accelerating routine digital captures at scale.

Pacific Dental Services in Irvine, California reports more than 3.75 million lifetime restorations using CEREC (Chairside Economical Restoration of Esthetic Ceramics) CAD/CAM technology, including 427,000 plus in 2023. That is a concrete signal that large networks are running high-volume digital workflows every day. (PDS Health)

Heartland Dental in Effingham, Illinois agreed to equip all of its U.S. locations with iTero Element scanners, anchoring an end-to-end digital path in general practice settings. (Globe News Wire)

In the U.K., mydentist states it has the largest installed base of intraoral scanners in UK dentistry, with more than 75 percent of practices having access to this technology.

On the deals side, valuations underscore the category’s importance. Envista agreed to acquire Carestream Dental’s intraoral scanner business for 600 million dollars. Reuters reported MBK Partners’ acquisition of Medit, a major scanner maker, at roughly 1.9 to 2.0 billion dollars. For historical context, 3M bought Brontes Technologies, an early intraoral imaging developer, for 95 million dollars.

Globally, the intraoral scanner market is expanding at a high single digit to low double digit rate, with recent estimates placing 2024 to 2025 revenue around 0.5 to 0.8 billion dollars and projections reaching roughly 1.1 to 1.6 billion dollars by the early to mid 2030s. (Future Market Insights, Fact MR & Intel Market Research)

When scans get hit with saliva, shadows, and tongue cameos, you circle the mess and fix only that zone.

Fewer rescans, fewer lab do-overs, calmer chair. Your schedule smiles.

What images could use this AI cleaning function in your industry? Let us know in the comments!

Ready to claim your stake in this shift? Dive into the details: US 2024/0366338 A1.