By Chris Wieland, Force 3 Senior Systems Engineer
Did you know that lemon juice keeps apples from turning brown? How do they do that? It’s one of those things you may get curious about every once in a while. What about going to the dentist, how do they get the images from one room to the other? Now this is a mystery that our team has debunked. Medical imaging might seem complicated or even daunting, but Force 3 and our DDRS team has approached this just like any other project.
The solution is comprised of many installations that connect and form an efficient process for our customers. The US Air Force, US Navy and Marine Corps use these installations in providing the very best in dentistry to their service members.
The solution is comprised of two major categories: hardware and software. The hardware is built on systems and modalities, which are dental related devices. The systems are servers, computer systems, and OS’s that all work together. The modalities are comprised of panoramic radiograph systems used to visualize the entire upper (maxilla) and lower (mandible) jaws including the teeth, maxillary sinuses, and nasal cavity through the x-ray process. Here is an example:
An additional dental modality is the intra-oral x-ray generation device, used in conjunction with digital dental sensors. Here is an example of an x-ray created with this solution:
Phosphor plate technology, used by the Air Techniques ScanX intra-oral scanning system, looks like this:
Although the ScanX intra-oral systems are deployed during the DDRS installation, they are used as backup solutions to the digital sensors and distal panoramic systems. The reason being is the quality of the phosphor plate images are not at the same level as the digital sensors.
The hardware portion of the solution, consist of servers, pc systems, modalities and sensors. The software for the solution is typically one of two vendor software applications: XrayVision DCV software offered by Apteryx Inc. and MiPACS dental software offered by Medicor Imaging a division Lead Technology Inc.
The software for the DDRS solution brings together the images captured by the digital dental sensors along with patient information and characteristics. The data is then stored onto the server and PC systems into a common accessible database. This database provides the patient data (record) along with images and information to potentially any DoD medical service location around the world. This means portable, secure, accurate and prompt patient information that relies less on paper or film for any service member to any service location.
We’ve figured out how the whole medical imaging works, but we still don’t know why lemon juice keeps your apples from turning brown. We’ll leave that to the experts. For now, just eat your apples before they go bad, and brush your teeth. Maybe you can avoid the dentist and x-rays all-together.
