Capturing Bite for a Sleep Apnea Oral Appliance

There are numerous ways to capture the desired relationship between the upper and lower jaws. When doing this clinically with a digital scanner like the Medit i500, some simple rules will make your life easy.

Intra-Oral scanners do not like dark air space (oral cavity) and tissue movement. So eliminating the tongue from the picture, while trying to capture the buccal bite, can make the process easier. Of course, no movement of the jaws are also critical when you are trying to capture the occlusion.

The method used here is with the bite fork of the George Gauge. Unlike the traditional method, no bite registration is used. Also, note that the 2 mm bite fork did not provide enough clearance for the posterior teeth. Instead of moving to the 5 mm fork, we just kept adding cotton pellets / paper at the incisal edges of the gauge to increase the vertical to the desired height. You can see the new vertical dimension achieved with this technique.

It is just meant to displace the tongue and get it out of the way so the software has an easier time finding landmarks it can stitch to.

DELIVERY OF PROSOMNUS MICRO2 DEVICE

The very distal of the upper appliance had to be adjusted as it was impinging on the coronoid process. The area was polished and delivered to the patient. No other adjustments were made.