Chinese Robot Achieves First Fully Automated Dental Implant Surgery

The latest advance in robotics has taken place in one of our favorite industries--dentistry.

This past fall in China, a robot installed a pair of dental implants for a woman. The procedure is perhaps the world’s first fully automated dental implant surgery. While robots have had a place at the operating table for several years in medicine and at the dentist’s chair, this fully automated procedure is thought to be the first robotic surgery merely supervised by human dentists.

According to reports, the robot successfully fitted the implants within the clinically accepted margin of error for human dentists of 0.2-0.3 mm.  Dentistry experts in China, quoted in Science and Technology Daily, contend that robots can safely conduct many dental surgeries with more accuracy and agility than their human counterparts, especially for procedures in narrow spaces like the oral cavity.

In 2017, Florida-based Neocis earned FDA approval for the first robotic system to assist dentists for implant surgeries. The software that drives Yomi centers on mapping out the surgery from a patient’s CT scan.

Dentistry is at the intersection of human intelligence and technology, specifically the precision afforded by robotics. Fortunately, whether a surgery is performed by humans or robots, clinics will continue to need dental supplies from Richmond Dental and Medical!