Robots might not be taking over the world, but they’re proving to be useful assistants in the dental field.

With the use of the Yomi dental system, the first FDA cleared robot-assisted dental surgery system, Dr. LisaMarie Sarhangian and Dr. Leslie Fish has combined completed over 750 robotic dental implants in their Chandler office.

There are only about 50 Yomi dental systems installed in dental clinics throughout the world and their office is the only clinic in Arizona to use the system. 

To date, the two have completed more dental implants with the robotic assistant than any other dental surgeons in the world.

“We didn’t go into it looking to be a leader, we went into it just looking to give our patients access to the best technology that we could,” Sarhangian said.

“And I think keeping our eyes on doing that for every patient that’s before us, has led us to do the numbers that we’ve done.”

Yomi, developed by Neocis, is a computerized dental navigational system that offers surgeons precise physical guidance based on a pre-planned drilling route based on the patient’s CAT scans.

The robotic arm limits the surgeon’s free-hand mobility while directing a surgeon’s drill location and depth to plant the metal implant post into a patient’s jawbone. That nearly eliminates the possibility of drill errors.

Atop the implant sits a connector, known as an abutment, connected to the replacement tooth, which makes up the entirety of what is generally called a dental implant.

“I’ve been doing this a long time and can I do it on my own, sure. But I’m human,” Fish said. “Between my surgical skills and the robotic assistance, we’re more accurate. It’s impossible for a human to be a drill press.”

Dental implants have a high success rate – only about 5- to 10-percent of dental implants fail, an outcome likely the result if the implant does not bond with the jawbone or factors such as microbial infections, according to a Clinical Implant Dentistry and Related Research study.

“There’s some amount of error anytime a human’s drilling,” Sarahagian said. “But if we’ve already pre-planned the implant to a certain location to avoid those anatomical structures and it’s locking us into that replant position and greatly helps us avoid those anatomical structures.”

Robotics, such as da Vinci for laparoscopic surgery in the abdomen or pelvis, are becoming increasingly more common in surgical practices, and Fish said Yomi is the first step for dentistry.

“Dentistry works in fractions of a millimeter,” Fish said. “For a human being repeatedly to be able to keep that precision is nearly impossible. So I do think whether it will be a decade from now, I think dentistry will be robotics.”

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