Our Digital Dental Laboratory in Dubai

Capture. The prepared tooth, the opposing arch and the bite are recorded with a Dentsply Sirona Primescan AC intraoral scanner, which captures more than a million three-dimensional points per second and covers everything from a single tooth to a full arch. Digital capture avoids the distortion that occurs when an impression material sets, is transported and is poured into stone, and the margin can be checked on screen and re-scanned immediately if it is not clear.

Design. The restoration is designed in CAD software against the opposing teeth and the recorded bite. Contours, contact points and emergence from the gum are set deliberately rather than adjusted at the chair, and the design can be shown to the patient before anything is produced.

Production. The restoration is milled or printed from an industrially manufactured block of known composition, which is more homogeneous and more predictable than material processed by hand.

Finishing. Staining, glazing and, where required, layering are done by the technician. This is the stage that decides whether a front tooth reads as natural, and it remains manual work.

Checking. The fit of the margin is inspected under a dental operating microscope before anything is cemented. A gap or an overhang of a tenth of a millimetre decides whether the restoration stays clean for ten years or collects plaque from the first month, and it is not visible to the unaided eye.

Fitting and adjustment. The restoration is tried in, the bite and contacts are checked, and any correction is made with the technician available rather than by appointment next week.

The laboratory produces crowns, bridges, inlays, onlays and removable dentures, veneers and the trial smiles that precede them, abutments and restorations for dental implants, temporary restorations, diagnostic wax-ups, night guards and occlusal splints, and repairs and relines of existing dentures.

It also produces surgical guides for implant placement. A guide is designed on the cone beam volume and the intraoral scan together, so the plan made on the CBCT scan is transferred into the mouth as a physical template rather than reproduced freehand.

Zirconia is used where strength is the priority: molars, longer spans and patients with heavy or grinding bites. Current translucent grades are acceptable in visible positions, though the most translucent formulations trade some strength for optical quality.

Lithium disilicate and other glass ceramics are used where appearance is decisive, typically front teeth and veneers, because they reproduce the depth and light behaviour of enamel more convincingly.

Polymer materials are used for temporaries, splints, trial restorations and long-term provisional work, and cast metal frameworks for partial dentures where rigidity and thin section matter.

The material is chosen from the position of the tooth, the load it will carry, the space available after preparation and how the restoration will be cleaned. There is no single best material, and any laboratory that offers one is answering a different question than the one being asked.

The practical differences show up in three places. Shade matching is decided with your own teeth in front of the person making the restoration. Adjustments and remakes are handled internally, so a correction does not restart a week-long external cycle. And the treatment schedule is set by the clinical work rather than by transport arrangements between two organisations.

There is also a quieter benefit. When the laboratory is part of the clinic, the technician sees the finished cases come back for review years later. That feedback loop — seeing which margins held, which contacts opened, which shades aged well — is the thing an external laboratory almost never gets, and it is what improves the work over time.

What an in-house laboratory does not do is make a poorly planned restoration succeed. Production quality cannot compensate for a preparation that leaves too little space, a bite that has not been assessed or gums that are inflamed, which is why the planning stages described on the treatment pages come first.

Laboratory work is not billed separately to the patient. It is included in the quotation for the restoration, and that quotation is given in writing after the examination, since the material, the number of units and the stages involved determine it.

Having a laboratory in the building is not presented here as a way to make restorations cheaper — it would be misleading to claim that. What it changes is the level of control over the result and the length of the loop when something needs adjusting.

At ELEMENTAL this treatment is carried out by Dr. Artem Shyshko, General Dentist.