Episode Transcript
[00:00:06] Speaker 1: Welcome back to the Evolution of Dental Podcast, brought to you by Evolution Dental Science. We share the stories of the people and the technology shaping the world of dentistry. And speaking of shaping the world of dentistry, what's more important than finding the right bite? Which is the subject of our conversation today with Björn Zäuner. This is a problem that I never really thought was going to be solved, if I'm honest. And then when I found out about your BiteFinder a couple of years ago, I was… To say I was impressed,well, it's such an understatement. Like, it's such an incredible leap. You go from this advanced digital process where you're intraoral scanning, you know, you get these scanners that are accurate to 10-15 microns, you've cross-arch. Okay. And now we got this awesome scan. But then the bite's off because, you know, half the time they don't know what they're doing with that. And so it's either Blu-Mousse and they're shipping you that or you’re hand articulating the 3D printed model. And now you're back to the analog all over again. So yeah, you know what? You tell me a little bit more. How did you overcome that?
[00:00:58] Speaker 2: So the three issues we have with an intraoral scanner are actually one, the scanner itself and the brand doesn't matter here. Right. So they're all a bit different, but they all have the same issue. It's you scan upper, you scan lower and then you say bite down and you scan the bite. The single jaw will be matched into the bite scan. And in that process of matching there's a mistake that can happen. Then there's people who only scan one side and skip the other one. That's definitely not helping. So please always scan both sides. And not only the bite, but also in general, please, no more quadrants. Do the full arch scan, maybe wide scan. That's fine. Use BiteFinder, but do a full arch. So that is an important one, so they’re matching. Number two: the user. Right. Similar to every computer issue is, usually the problem sits in front of the computer. And it's the dentist or the assistant who is performing the scan. They are busy. Right. So they have to be fast, time pressure is there. And then you put, depending on the scanner, some are bigger than others, but it's not easy to do a great scan, right? To be honest. And then the third factor is the patient. So the patient might be lying down. They might be afraid of the dentist. They're shaking. They have pain here. So they bite a little tilted right. More on this side than on that side, all kinds of crazy stuff. So this all combined makes it impossible to have a great bite that is scanned. So the only reason, looking at first principles we came to was calculating or simulating the bite, which will reduce all these errors we've talked to before. So how it essentially works is we try to teach the computer to see what our hands feel right. As a technician, what you try to do when you're experienced, you know, more or less how to put them together, how to articulate them well. And across the board, if you have a big lab in the US, we have that problem. Especially because you guys have huge labs, right. In Germany you have a lot of small labs where you have like the owner and he takes care of the articulation. Right? So then you at least can think that the quality is a bit better on average. But if you have like 10-20 people that all day do nothing but articulating to models. Yeah, mistakes happen. Right. So and that's the foundation of everything. So the computer analyzes like the anatomy, how the crowns are, how the angulation is, you have casts, right? Analyzing the abrasions, the fissures. And then it simulates basically the bite process and gets into maximum intercuspation. Right. So that's the starting point. And it i s what we saw had the biggest impact on our remake rate in the lab. It’s to make sure that what we start on before we design matters a lot. Right. And if you can try to avoid problems before you go into production, right.
[00:04:09] Speaker 1: And so you said it kind of feels out the articulation sort of like, like a human with a hand articulator.
[00:04:15] Speaker 2: Yeah. Exactly. Right. So it's I mean, some people compare it also to like a digital version. I mean, we started with static. I go to what we did next, but it's like, a functional generated pathway, FGP technique, right, where you basically try to simulate what the human would do, with something that is a little softer, like wax or silicone or whatever, to try to get an impression of what would happen when you place the crown and adjust it accordingly. And that's basically what we try to automate in a few seconds without any expert knowledge needed. So we put in the two scans, we find a MIP, then we generate from MIP every possible lower jaw movement. All the expressive movements and then half that. And we call the next step a virtual try on. Right. So when you do the design, you can use that to virtually adjust your crown design or your splint or your denture, whatever, with the patient's specific movements. So you don't have to manually remove that early contact after milling right in the lab or in the clinic. That was the whole concept. And then we took it a step further with also, being able to, increase the vertical dimension, which most people didn't even see. And they go crazy when they figure out that, “What?! You can also do that?” But yeah, we reverse engineer the most likely opening of the vertical. You can use it for splints, tabletops, dentures. It's really nice. It's more accurate than what you could do in any other software so far. Then the crazy thing, I mean, you asked about the xSNAP. We’ve worked together with xSNAP for a few years now. It's basically a 3D printed articulator. And now, if we combine the two technologies, it's beautiful because it makes our virtual technology a tangible physical product. Right? So we take the scan, we optimize occlusion, generate the motion, generate a model with this. We call it a Biometric Articulator. So we use the movement to carve out a patient's specific condylar path and the patient-specific incisal table, in the model. So it's one step. It's beautiful. It's different to an articulated right. It's not as heavy. So you have to get used to it. But imagine you get all this in one click. Fully automated, even in color if you want! So it's just a next level step because, one of our slogans besides, “bad bites suck”, which is like the foundation of why we exist, is “no human is average”. And that's a bit more powerful, I would say, in terms of the slogan and why that matters. And we took that from the average value articulator. Right. And the problem is actually the thing itself, it's practical, but it assumes that every human is the same, and we can use 25 degrees or 30 degrees for all of us. But you may be 32 and I may be 37 degrees. Whatever. And if we use the same for everybody, then somebody has to adjust it, or the patient has to live with something that is not custom made for them. It's like everybody going into a shop and buying medium sized T-shirts. Right? Doesn't work.
[00:07:39] Speaker 1: Absolutely. So it sounds like the xSNAP was, so, that's outside of BiteFinder. But then you co-developed a solution to work together. Is that right?
[00:07:50] Speaker 2: Yeah. So they started, on their own. Now it's part of the BiteFinder group. Right. And the technologies are merged. It's a beautiful combination in terms of workflow, how it fits together. We can do very nice things now. Also the new version, which is also combining tracked motion. Right. So we generate one which is the most feasible option for the everyday case. But if you have a more special case, rehab case, and so on, you have these jaw tracking devices. So you can also upload the recorded motion and use that to create this articulator. Or you can even combine both technologies. Right. So we have the tracked one with the simulated one. And you get the best of both worlds, because if it is simulated, the simulation is very good at these close movements which are relevant for the trial design. And not so good for these, very, big movements. Right. And especially if you look at crazy rehab cases, it's very important, right? If people have very difficult TMJ issues or so on.
[00:08:55:58] Speaker 1: Yeah. So that's one of the things I was noticing with it, is that it's so much more than just a hinge, you know. It has that multitrack movement and it has the support pin in the middle that also guides the plane of occlusion there. And it sounds like your interest in technology was a pretty heavy influence in getting into this. And developing AI solutions is not an easy thing to do. Was that a daunting experience? Like, did you jump into that face first or how was that like?
[00:09:29] Speaker 2: Yeah. No, it's definitely challenging. It continues to be. But it's also super interesting. Right. So, I mean, looking at the different factors on what needs to be done to achieve something like that is one, you need to really precisely understand the problem. Right. And that's I think what's different. And we're not a huge team. Right. So everybody still asks like why can’t somebody else just do it? I mean, yeah you can try, but in most big organizations, the problem is that you have, maybe you even have 100 developers. Other developers, right? They don't have the dental knowledge. So then they are consolidated under a manager and then he speaks to somebody who has some dental knowledge and they try to figure something out, and then they need to translate it to all these people and they do something, and it's different than what’s expected. And this loop is incredibly inefficient. So if you get together like we have been in the beginning and you have all the necessary information you need to actually solve the problem, we had real life data from the lab. We could connect like bad cases, outcomes which track very well. If we had remakes and what was the reason for it? What was the original data? How would that look like when we optimize the data before so we could track all that? And we fundamentally tried to break down occlusion, which is a big part of what we try to achieve here as an overall big picture, because dentistry is beautiful and the artisanship is nice. But it’s also what limits us, in terms of, growth. Right. We don't have enough technicians to do this artisanship. Right. And it's so complicated to make a beautiful and functional crown at the same time. So what we wanted to do is take this almost religious approach on occlusion, because you have all these different people who say, this is how you do occlusion, this is how it’s done. And it's like, yeah, every human is different, but the concept shouldn't be too crazy apart and it shouldn't be only possible by a handful of people. Right? Everybody deserves a functional bite. Right? This is the foundation of what we're trying to achieve. So it doesn't matter to what kind of dentists you go, or what kind of lab you go to. If they use BiteFinder, you will get a functional restoration. Right. And everybody deserves that.
[00:11:51] Speaker 1: Yeah, the bites may be individualized, but the science of the bite is persistent, even though it applies differently from one to the next.
[00:12:00] Speaker 2: And we have parameters you can change. Right. And you can always argue about like, when is a contact point a contact point? Right. That's a big one. Right. Okay. Then okay. Now we offer that you can define yourself what a contact point is, how much surface you would need. But there's a, I mean, at some point you have to say now if it's contact or not. Right. So but what it comes down to is, is it a reasonable occlusion to start from? Right. We have a balance or is it like intersecting for a millimeter on that one side which is like can't be true, right. You have some movement of the root, in the structure. But not a millimeter. Right.
[00:12:44] Speaker 1: Right. Absolutely. And it's particularly useful for people with a weird crossbite, like my own, where if we take just one quadrant bite even on a full arch scan, the result is going to be that one side of the arch is passing through the other. And even with both quadrants scanned, sometimes the software can't really reconcile the difference there. So. Yeah. And I'm certainly not the only one in that boat. So it's a very powerful solution to a pretty common problem. And you were mentioning before we started recording that you just got that from Brazil, is that right? How's this been received internationally in various countries? What's the reception been like?
[00:13:24] Speaker 2: Yeah, that's to be honest, that's completely crazy. Because we were, I mean, we didn't put any boundaries up from the beginning. We started as a solution for our own and then eventually talking to friends who had labs and all that, they said, “Oh, what you're doing? How did you solve that? I mean, and can I also have that?” and I’m like, “Yeah, sure”. And eventually we started, making it an actually usable product and offering it to other people. And that came with a lot of challenges. But one of the things we didn't do is we didn't put up any boundaries. Right? So usually when you start, you start in your country and then you go to the next one, you look into it and blah, blah, blah. So we launched at IDS, and it's international, right? We’re international. So all the people that have an intrinsic motivation to learn are going to exhibitions, right? They go there to explore or what's new. And people came and they were like, “What the hell? Yeah, that works? Can I try it?” right. So they brought it back to their countries. So from like a few weeks after we launched, we've been in almost 40 countries.
[00:14:31] Speaker 1: 40 countries?!
[00:14:32] Speaker 2: Yea, and since then it's been going completely crazy. And of course there are countries where we are more successful than others. And one of them is Brazil. Brazil's our number one country for the last, like 6 to 9 months, which is crazy. And it's because somebody picked it up at IDS. It is crazy. We have more than 400 new users from Brazil every month.
[00:14:53] Speaker 1: 400 a month. That's insane.
[00:14:55] Speaker 2: I know! It’s like okay, we have to go to Brazil.
[00:15:00] Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely!
[00:15:02] Speaker 2: And it's an incredible country. Hospitality is amazing. Food is amazing. Music. Right. It was the most energetic exhibition we've been to so far. It's no comparison right? It's massive. I mean, Brazil has the highest amount of dentists worldwide. They have incredibly amount of universities. They produce so many dentists. Right. And it's, they're all very open. They're very social. Right. So it's crazy. And going to the market, we now hired two people in Brazil to translate everything in Portuguese and do stuff there. It's amazing. And the feedback is so good because they have these problems, they have so many new dentists and they buy scanners and they sell across the world, and it's going completely nuts. Right. So they need something that helps them control and get a consistent quality. So we're there to help and it's going great.
[00:15:58] Speaker 1: That sounds awesome. If I can walk back a step though, if I've heard you correctly, you said you developed it as an in-house solution and then other people were interested in it. This wasn't a product that you intended to launch from the outset. This was something you built for your purposes.
[00:16:16] Speaker 2: Yeah, we built it out of necessity. Right. Because we had bad issues like everybody had. Right. And then essentially it became bigger than what was going on in the lab. Right? So I decided to sell the lab last year and focus full time on this because it's... You know, I always like doing all these big projects and automations and all that. But in Germany, you could not build a huge, massive lab. It's just not built for that. So, I always like to talk to other big labs and brainstorm on how you can improve things. And now I think,, we have more than 13,000 users worldwide. And I think we visited almost a thousand labs over the last two years in person, because we travel a lot and very big labs, small labs, and I can do what I always wanted to do in my own right. Just improve things, automate things, and make them better on scale, because that's what we need.
[00:17:16] Speaker 1: A thousand labs in two years, that's so many It's like two a day. It's incredible.
[00:17:21] Speaker 2: It's crazy. So we've seen so many, so many different setups. And we now have a few people in the US and in Germany and in Ireland and, you know, it's yeah, it's crazy to be honest. It's really crazy. But it's also very rewarding because people are open. They need solutions. Every lab is swamped. And you guys know it best, right? With work. Right. It's not that the work is, like, not there. It's just like, how can we even handle all that work?
[00:17:55] Speaker 1: Right! As you said, there are less dental technicians and more work all the time. Did you find that there’s more labs or doctors, or is it, kind of an even split between in your user base?
[00:18:07] Speaker 2: So that's one of the most interesting questions we still face, openly share that. Right. So we were born in the lab, right? So the lab is our natural place to be. The lab is the natural solution provider to the dentists, right?
[00:18:22] Speaker 1: You were an ortho lab, right?
[00:18:25] Speaker 2: Yeah ortho. So the lab was always there to help resolve issues because the dentist was busy treating the patients and, like, oh, I did something. Please fix it. Right. So that's fine. That's the relationship. Right. But the biggest value add we have is on the clinical side or on a patient side, because if we see that when you run BiteFinder on the cases, the average insertion time goes down a lot. Right. And a dentist’s hour, especially in the US, is so expensive nowadays that if we save them a few minutes, on every treatment that's huge. You can treat more patients on a daily basis and therefore, they can send more cases to the lab. Right. So it's all a win-win situation. The patient doesn't have to come back twice because they say it's not good. And they grind for five minutes. And then the next patient is in the chair waiting. And then they say go home, try and come back in two weeks. If it's not good, what happens? They come back and then they continue to adjust it. Right. And that's not how it should be. Right. And that is something where we see a lot of dentists are interested, but it's a bit harder for the every-day general dentists, let's say, to apply it. Right. They have the interest, but they, for example, don't have a scanner yet. So they just call the lab and say, please use this. I want less chairside adjustments… So to be precise, like a third of our customers already are dentists. And two thirds are labs. So that is roughly the split. But a big role from the dentist’s side, especially now with growing chairside, in-house labs. You know, all that, especially with the xSNAP. It's beautiful. If you have a printer and a scanner in the clinic, you just, you scan, you click one button, and this will be transferred to your printer, and you have it. Yeah.
[00:20:22] Speaker 1: Especially in an increasing world of model free restorations.
[00:20:26] Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. And why do we need to model at all right? I mean, with this it might be nice to have it. But before it was just, it was a check model, right, you used it to see and check if what you milled or printed is fitting. Right,
[00:20:45] Speaker 1: Right.
[00:20:46] Speaker 2: But if we do everything right in the first place, we wouldn't need that, right? If we have calibrated machines, furnaces and all that. It then is just due to the fact, how is my design? Because the manufacturing part should reflect the design almost 1 to 1 with a deviation that is okay. Right. Which is usually the case. So the problem is the beginning, with the data. And that's mainly the bite. The relation of the two jaws in space. If they're slightly off and then you do your design based on that, then your crown is also slightly off. And that's why you have to check it afterwards.
[00:21:24] Speaker 1: Yeah. It's a good way to get that out of the way and handled before it ever hits production.
[00:21:30] Speaker 2: Exactly.
[00:21:32] Speaker 1: [Especially] these days because I mean, you know, your average cost per crown, cost of materials with zirconia, if you're talking lab costs anyway, is going to be between like $4-8, depending on the level of zirconia you're using. So materials are not so bad, but it's the time… On the positive end, you may have a milling machine that can crank one out and say 10-12 minutes a unit. On the more average end of things you're looking at probably 20 minutes or so. And it has nothing to do with the chairside mills, which are their own animal there. So yeah, the time that it consumes. And then also you have human interaction. By that I mean ideally, yeah, they just drop into place and something like BiteFinder that definitely pushes a lot further toward the envelope there. But you still, somebody has to sit there and adjust it and make sure that all the milling marks are removed, all the support plans are no longer visible on the crown. Somebody has to glaze and stain it. Yeah. It's the time of going back and readjusting and changing, especially as you said, chairside.
[00:22:35] Speaker 2: Yeah. And you have material implications, right, where you have zirconia, you grind it down in the chair, you have micro cracks and then you have to polish it afterwards. And then it affects the longevity of the crown. And then you have labs to give guarantee and then, you know, the whole entanglement of craziness is just so unnecessary. Right. So we try to look at it from, how can we reduce the variables of error here in that process? And the only way to avoid it is to have a good organization. Right? To start with a management system where you have your cases. It starts with getting good data, and we are now also getting to a point where we check the general quality of the scan not only the bite, but because there's more to it than the bite itself. But that’s one major thing. And then we should only work on good data because or else its destiny is clear, right? It will be a f* up somewhere, right. And it will not be useful to do that. And then you have to make sure that it’s good, we checked that. We checked the design, and it goes in the machine. And then, you know, the regular process. It shouldn't be that hard… in theory.
[00:23:56] Speaker 1: You can only create a crown as good as the data you're provided.
[00:23:59] Speaker 2: Yeah. Garbage in, garbage out.
[00: 24: 01] Speaker 1: And it's the impression before, and now of the scan. You can only rise to the quality of the data. And so, as I understand, BiteFinder does some automatic correction of the scan. That is that right?
[00:24:16] Speaker 2: So we do a lot of things, and then we transition to more and more parts of our workflow, improvements because it's a necessary thing to do. Right. And, we work with a lot of great partners, right? Where we integrate with scanners, with management systems. Right. And, CAD systems, like exocad, printers, you know. We are going to launch some nice integrations at Chicago as well. So it's the ease of use, right? It’s the connectivity that is also missing in dental. That was always annoying because you have these ten different software pieces and none of it communicates with each other…
[00:24:57] Speaker 1: You have some of it that’s intentional, even.
[00:25:00] Speaker 2: It’s crazy.
[00:25:01] Speaker 1: What are they, like, intentionally not wanting to communicate with each other?
[00:25:03] Speaker 2: Probably? I get it right. If you have a closed system, it allows more ease of use, and more control of the workflow. But dental is so complicated, so hard to have everything in one closed loop. Right. So the downside then is you have to connect pieces and then it gets really messy.
[00:25:30] Speaker 1: And that's why BiteFinder is completely cloud based. You have a very open platform.
[00:25:35] Speaker 2: It is cloud based. We have an open API. We like to integrate everywhere we can because, like it's not only that no human is average, but also no lab and no clinic is average. Right. So they all have different ways on how to do things. And why should we preach, “this is the only way”, right? I mean, we can say, “this is the way we know that works really well. And if you want, you can just use this”. But if you have another way, why shouldn't we be able to integrate into that? We have labs who have their own portals where doctors upload cases. We can integrate there so at the moment the dentist uploads something, we can check it and we say “meep meep! scan quality is not good! Here's a proposal of how we automatically optimize the data. Do you want to accept that or do you want to go with your own version?”, stuff like that, we did.
[00:26:27] Speaker 1: That sounds like a huge time saver. Tell me a little bit more about that. Like, where it's basically intercepting the scan data before the lab ever gets it. It’s almost like an extra employee verifying the data. Is that right?
[00:26:39] Speaker 2: Exactly. Yeah. And that can be done in existing lab management software like GreatLab.io, for example, we have an integration pilot and different others, we have portals like, just websites of dental labs they build. We can basically just upload in an STL. We now worked on the integration with SprintRay, for example. Right. They also have their design service. So the moment you upload something, it's important to have that direct feedback. Right. And we work on intraoral scanner integrations a lot where directly when you do the scan you can also be informed about that, or you can choose if you even want to do a bite scan or not. Because if it's wrong anyways, just save the time. Do a full arch scan, skip the quadrant part please, and skip the bite scan right if you if you're time-aware right.
[00:27:33] Speaker 1: That sounds really exciting. So you're working on, is it you're working on, or you’re already live integrated with some of these iOS platforms, where they can check the bite and check the scan data in real time?
[00:27:45] Speaker 2: Yeah. It's in process with most of them. But there's a few already live, integrated. Of course it's never finished, right? Integrations get better all the time. But MEDIT, for example, was one of the early ones we integrated. One, yes, different others. So, it's nice but the workflow sometimes is just too constrained by design. Right. So it's not, it wasn't the idea to simply say, I don't want to have a bite scan. Right. It's part of their standard workflow. So, it takes a while to rethink their whole workflows. But yeah, in general it's possible, but the most used way is that the dentist just sends scans through the lab. And the lab, either in the lab management system automatically uses or they use our software, or they use whatever. Different forms, or they use it in exocad directly. It's very nice. You can have it in the DB, open the case, optimize it before you do any design.
[00:28:49] Speaker 1: Before you even dive in and start placing teeth.
[00:28:51] Speaker 2: Yeah.exactly. In the end there’s a human at every case, behind every case, right. We tend to forget that, speaking only about milling machines and the newest zirconia, and there's inefficiency here and there. But in the end, you know, there's a patient who needs to wear this crown, for the rest of his life. Right. So, better fits.
[00:29:13] Speaker 1: Absolutely. I mean, that's one of the things for me anyway, that got me into this was the technology and this bridge between, “man, this is the coolest tech”. But also, we're making completely unique things that change people's lives that have never been made in the history of mankind before. Each one of them is completely unique. And that's something I absolutely need to keep in mind. And that's really cool to see how you've intercepted further and further up the pipeline of some of the pain points that caused this, either not to be ideal for the patient and also take up more time with the chairside and in the lab remakes and adjustments. And integrating all that into one little platform that's able to clean that up before it even hits the bench, as they say. So did you know from the beginning that you were going to be using an AI platform for this? And with the AI what was that like diving into that for the first time? Like, because AI just a couple of years ago, for most people anyway, was just this esoteric theory that was in sci fi movies. And then now you're using it to articulate the bites better than most people can. Most of the experts, like you said, the “gatekeeping wizards”, haha, what was that like?
[00:30:28] Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, the wizards sitting at the master bench, the quality control technicians. Yeah. I mean, look, the vision changes a lot. I mean, it's nothing close to the original idea, and I think that's very natural and that's okay. So we go with the flow, but we, let's say we develop the consequences of our vision and the communication we have with the users on a day to day basis. So the overall idea from the beginning was to have this end to end quality control and how we do it, that is evolving all the time, but end to end quality control, which allows us to prevent bad dentistry from happening. Right. The crown that is too high, it stays in the mouth, that will f* up your posture, headaches and all that. The remakes and all that. And that makes good dentistry better, right? The people who try really hard but they take hours to make a nice crown because they care, but it's simply not economically feasible anymore to spend that amount of time. So this is only possible by having a software that doesn't get tired, that doesn't retire. That is always there to look at the cases. Right? I was lucky, I had great master technicians. I had a dad who was a dentist I could always ask, like, is that right? Is that the correct way, how this fits together? Right. But it's not scalable. Right. And it's not feasible to look at every case, especially when we see the US DSOs like massive scale, they can get prices from labs that are very hard to get a consistent quality on. But at the same time they need to get a crown that fits, because even if it's cheap and they have to spend an hour chairside adjusting, I mean, the math doesn’t math, right? That's the big problem here. So then what's the original vision? It was always fascinating to us to automate processes, right, to reduce manual error because it's not that humans couldn't do it. And then most things we are still, and will be better at than the machine. Right? No question. And there will always be cases where somebody needs to look at. Right. So we have this built in with the human in the loop. Right. So that works. But it's just not scalable. And we need to equip our technicians with technology that allows them to do 100 cases a day. And not only 10 or 20 or 40. Right. So we need to get better. We need to have this. Basically, it's more like becoming a cyborg, right? So getting the tools to have and not being replaced. Right. That's not happening. There's so much potential. We work on nice prototypes, for example. Also, you spoke about removables, right. So there's, I think I read that 40 million Americans that need a denture don't get one because it's too expensive and they don't get appointments. I mean what the hell?
[00:33:39] Speaker 1: Or they don't fit.
[00:33:40] Speaker 2: Or they don't fit right?
[00:33:42] Speaker 1: They had one and they don’t fit so they just don’t wear them.
[00:33:43] Speaker 2: What?! That is half of Germany's population! Running around without teeth, right? It's a basic human right to chew food, and not only get slushies or something. Right. This is ridiculous. And why is that so? Because we did some checks and the average appointments needed to get a denture in is ridiculously high it’s eight appointments. Eight! What the hell? I mean, because they send a scan and the technician tries to somehow find the vertical dimension. They ship something, they adjust it, ship back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. Yeah, of course that will be expensive! And you're looking at more than $1,000 for a removable denture that is like okay-ish. I mean, what? That's crazy. So we think, like, I think this process should be automated. We have everything we need for that. Get a good CBCT, a good IO scanner, everything will be matched. Take automated denture designs, virtual try on of the vertical. Check their movements. Boom. That's it. Right. So there's so many amazing things you can do. But, maybe I'll just give you a quick look at the new, update we're going to launch in Chicago?
[00:35:01] Speaker 1: Yes, please!
[00:35:02] Speaker 2: All right. So brand new version 4.0 is going to launch in Chicago. And it is nothing compared to what is live now, and people already love it. I'm really excited to go to that. Big things, what is new, it's cross-platform. So now the current version is only on Windows, so this will be, live in the browser on Mac and Windows, use it wherever you want. You can have, as you see, I call myself tab-messy. So in the browser I always have a gazzilion tabs open. So now I also have a gazillion tabs open in BiteFinder which is nice because I work on a lot of cases in parallel. That's cool.
[00:35:42] Speaker 1: But you can do that! You can open a bunch of them in parallel. That's really cool in and of itself.
[00:35:47] Speaker 2: Yes. So that works nice. We also have big requests like a case log where you can see previous cases and reload them and all that so that was cool. But essentially now you start with this screen. You choose what you want to do and then you, let's say Dynamic Occlusion, you just put all of the files in that you need. And that's the next big thing we changed because we started with the basics. What do you always have? Upper and lower jaw. But we came to the fact that all people ask like can it also do this and this and more complex cases. And what about margin lines. And you know it got a bit crazy. So the new architecture allows us to handle more data, which is not only upper and lower jaw scan, it is margin lines. It is face scans, it is CBCT, it is recorded motion, it is scan bodies. It is, you know, everything we can just dump it in here. And then, yeah, we do the magic. Right. So that's a big, big improvement. Because it also helps increase quality and cases that we can process. So that's very nice. And then just open a case here. Also a big change. Currently we only have a 2D preview. We now have a 3D preview. So everything here is free of charge until you export it. So you can look at it in 3D. You see the before in this case, it was scanned openly. So obviously not in maximum expansion, you can use that here. We also have a split view now so we can look at before and after at the same time. In this case it’s pretty obvious what's the better one, but in other cases, it's not. So that's very cool. We got jaw motion refined with our new engine, we got a few more motions in place now, so that we can simulate, including chewing. So all of that motion, we can just save and export as an XML file. You can use it in exocad to then, instead of an articulator, I use the motion to virtually adjust the design, which is amazing and reduces the adjustments by a lot. So that is cool. Definitely like that! The graphics are also a new level, just talked to some of our users in Brazil, and they say that that looks like serious software now. Hehe. Like, yeah. Before it was very functional. I mean, and then we are Swiss and German. We didn't focus too much on the esthetics at first. Let's say, we wanted it to work. So it just looks completely different. We got the object browser on the left, which helps us also manage different kinds of files. And also, if you don't like the result, you can rerun it and then you have multiple solutions here. And you can compare the solutions which is also great for tricky cases. Little usability things like auto-mesh transparency. When you look at it from above, it automatically gets transparent. You can check the contact points. That is beautiful. A functional piece that I love, which was, reported to us from a few customers. We had the vertical dimension previously as well. But looking at function, if say we do a splint, and the doctor typically sends the scans, with “I want a 3 millimeter opening”. Right. So let's say if I put in a three millimeter opening, that's nice. But now we also calculate the material thickness that this implies. So when we now connect it all with exocad we can even automate the whole process. I can see that 0.76 is not enough for material thickness in this case. So actually I need 1mm minimum material thickness. And this will translate into 3.4mm of bite opening.
[00:39:41] Speaker 1: That’s powerful! Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt. I'm just sitting there looking at it, thinking of bite splints I've designed recently. That's super helpful. And this is you said this integrates like this directly in the exocad!
[00:39:53] Speaker 2: Yeah. So we're working on an improved integration with exocad which we’ll launch at in size. Now we can do that. And you can for example, save that workflow with a custom workflow called bite splint. And then what it does is it loads the case, finds MIP, open it with the parameters you set to. In exocad you already have them in the work params for example. So you can directly grab that.
[00:40:16] Speaker 1: Pulls that straight in.
[00:40:17] Speaker 2: Yeah that will be very sweet.
[00:40:19] Speaker 1: Oh that's so cool.
[00:40:20] Speaker 2: Yeah. And then yeah. There are like these tiny things that just make so much sense. And I love that people we work with and who are beta testing that they love that. So that's great. We can even use that for, like, sleep apnea devices, which is like a big new thing, right? So you can go into protrusion, and then lock that movement and then open it in that position. So that's also very sweet. Open it and save it in that position through your design. That's it. You can now, for example, click the the X icon to generate the xSNAP also in the open position, which is also cool when you would need it. But I think in most cases, I would say do the splint and skip the model. So that's beautiful and new. Then the report, of course, similar to before, we have some values, different styling. We can also customize it, put the lab logo on top of it. They can share with the dentist. So all these sweet little quality of life improvements, which are nice. And then when we… let’s see do I have a printed case somewhere? Oh! Let me go to this one first, that's cool. So, looking at more data, when we now import the CBCT. The interesting thing is CBCT is usually done in an open position to have a better accuracy of the scan itself. But you need to work in an MIP, right? So we bring it back, and then we can also take into account the TMJ for generating the movements, which is cool. Especially for edentulous cases.
[00:42:03] Speaker 1: Björn, that's super impressive. Like this is so exciting for the nerd in me! Oh, man. That's incredible!
[00:42:12] Speaker 2: Oh. Let me just see another case somewhere…
[00:42:16] Speaker 1: Especially that it's able to process files as cumbersome as CBCT files like DCM files are heavy lifting for most software.
[00:42:27] Speaker 2: When we get a quadrant and we detect it, and you do the xSNAP, we generate an artificial second joint, to make it more stable. If you want to print.
[00:42:37] Speaker 1: Wow! That’s exciting. I say that like the rest of this isn’t. That’s really cool though. Wild, man!
[00:42:47] Speaker 2: Yeah, so that's a few of the news. I mean, more we'll share in Chicago. So… oh, maybe one more! So when you save a case, I mean, that's the scan now, but, if this would be a printable file, you can either download it or new ways also that we can share it, so we can send it, for example, you can integrate different printers we work with. Or you can send it and connect to your management system or to other users. Right. So you as a lab could send it to your dentist for approval. Right? So just connect with your dentist, send it. He will then open the file, see what you did and they can accept it. Or as I said, when you have a printable model, you can just directly put it on the printer and here we go. So that is the rough summary of v4. And there's more to come. It's going to be more connected, faster. Yeah. Just overall, we put so much time in this and user feedback.
[00:43:50] Speaker 1: It shows! Yeah. It sounds like you're just drinking in user feedback and then rising to every single occasion. Yeah, that's so impressive. I mean, that's its own job in and of itself is just taking in and filtering out all the user feedback.
[00:44:06] Speaker 2: Yes. Yeah. We love to stay close because of, I mean. We don't know better. Right. Everybody has problems. And we try to consolidate the feedback of what is really important to solve. What is a way of how they would like to use it, because I can sit here and think about it, or I just talk to ten people and figure out what they really want. Because sometimes I have a good idea. But, most of the time the people who do it every day, they know better, right? And, of course, coming from the lab, we are all, like, very, very hands on people. And we go to labs occasionally to do stuff and remember, like, oh, that was really painful to do that by hand, to get the feeling and fix the pain. But yeah, it's, you have to talk to people and we are very close. So everybody who wants to just feel free to book a demo is free on our website. Talk to us, give us feedback. We have WhatsApp groups whatsoever. It's, we drink that. Right. So we love that.
[00:45:15] Speaker 1: That's awesome. Yeah. Working directly with the people that you work back with, the customers. That's where the relationships should be. Where do you see the future of dentistry? Like where do you see this going in like five or even ten years? And not just BiteFinder, but beyond.
[00:45:33] Speaker 2: So I think a big part is the basics that we still need to improve. Even in the biggest labs, we go to, like the number one priority for most of them is still organization. How to handle data and files and Rx’s. And, you know, there's so much, how to handle materials and then compliance. And then if you, if you mill 20 crowns out of a blank and put it in a furnace, like, where does it go next?
[00:46:10] Speaker 1: Which one’s which? For sure.
[00:46:11] Speaker 2: Which one is which? Right. And in a fully automated process, there comes more and more challenges like that… I mean, it's complicated, but it's a basic problem, organization. Right. That is one thing I see a lot of potential, that needs to be optimized. The second thing is then, of course, what we focus on is the data pre-processing. So we make sure we only work on good data. So we check the quality. And then based on, so that's how we work with big labs. We process all the scans, we analyze the quality. And if it's below a certain quality threshold we try to fix it. And if we can fix it, it can continue. If we can’t fix it, it will, for example, send an email automatically to the dentist to say this has to be rescanned, because it's not just the bite that is off. It's like the complete scan is a mess. So that is something we shouldn't work on. Both of us. It will be frustrating. It will be 100% guaranteed a remake. So that's the thing. Also end to end quality control where we work with, for example, a few big labs that the end product like if you do a crown, a model, a splint, the end product will be scanned. So not human QC only, but scan it and then we compare it to the design, see if there's any differences. That's a big one. So we make sure that things go out the door that match the design. That is important. Design, definitely a big one. Right. So there's various companies that will now work on AI design for crowns and bridges and splints and all that great [stuff] yeah. So I think the customization and big part of AI design is also, good quality. So we work with almost all of them to improve the quality of the automated design. That's a big one for us. And then looking into what we can automate next, I mentioned something like dentures, which is heavily dependent on occlusion and vertical, where we excel at. Right. So that's a nice one. And then in the end, of course, there's a lot of clinical applications on chairside right. Connected to scanners. We see that, looking at X-rays, connecting all the data, make suggestions for treatment plans. Communication with the patient, I think, is impressive. So, one example that I still love and we had on our wish list, like, many, many years ago, I made a wish list. One was to fix occlusion. So we did that. And the other one was automatically generated, a nice video of how you would look when you have your new teeth, right? Which was very well done by TruSmile Video, for example, from exocad. So that is very nice, to see a simulated version of the outcome to agree on the treatment because, you know, the old mock ups and you send screenshots of the design in exocad is like for a patient, very hard to go off of that. Right. It's just imagination, it’s not there. We see that every day. For us it looks normal. And even this I mean for regular patients, this is like, what the hell?
[00:49:37] Speaker 1: Hehe I mean, that's my mouth? What?
[00:49:39] Speaker 2: Yeah. So having a face scan here, right? Makes things so much more compelling for a patient.
[00:49:48] Speaker 1: More human.
[00:49:50] Speaker 2: Yeah. More human. Right. And that's where I see this, and where I think technology will help us a lot because it makes things so much faster. To make it more human and more controlled over time. Right. Presented nicely. And compelling to a patient who has no idea of why I need that. Right. So another example splints. We talked about this before. If I can show him this is how you move. And maybe we even have a time period. So I can say if you continue to move like that for the next four years, we simulate the grinding. And that’s what you’ll look like in four years. And this is how you would look like, why do we go in here? We open it. We even have an automated proposal for a splint. We show what it looks like on your face, where at night it protects the teeth. We can print it chairside for $200. You have it in half an hour. Do you want it or not? Yes. Right.
[00:50:48] Speaker 1: It’s $200, half an hour. Save yourself a lifetime of suffering.
[00:50:52] Speaker 2: Exactly right. So these things will be much easier. There will be, not a lot of hassle. Because right now you have to know, okay, how do I do a splint? What do I need to take care of? How do I open the vertical? Do I have to take a leaf gauge? And then what material do I use? Do I sent it to the lab, or do I print it? And then how do I make sure it fits afterwards? I have to grind for half an hour and my hourly rate is $1,000 and blah, blah. And then you look at a splint that is like $1,000. What? Why? It shouldn't be that expensive. I mean, we all should make money, right? Don't get me wrong. Dentists need to make money. Labs need to make money. We need to make money, all good. But we can just do so much more and so much more efficiently because there's enough patients to treat. That's not the problem. It's just. It's incredibly inefficient. That's a problem.
[00:51:39] Speaker 1: I think that's a brilliant insight. Björn, thank you so much for taking your time with us today. Where can people find you online? Where can people find BiteFinder, and where can they learn more?
[00:51:50] Speaker 2: Yeah. So it's pretty easy. You can just, go to Bite-Finder.com, open our website or go to Instagram, look for BiteFinder. Facebook, LinkedIn, whatever. You can browse yourself, get some information, create a demo account for free, test it or, book a demo with us. Happy to personally show you and walk you through that. Love to show you all the tips and tricks. And then, if you want that, you can choose a package that suits you right for the volume you guys have. So it's pretty straightforward.
[00:52:30] Speaker 1: Awesome. Well, thank you again for joining us.
[00:52:33] Speaker 2: Hey, you’re welcome.
[00:52:34] Speaker 1: And thank you, everyone else for joining us for this episode of Evolution of Dental Podcast. Please look for us on all the major podcast platforms. Remember to like, subscribe and never stop evolving.
