Patent ID: 7944569
Filing Date: 2011-05-17
Classification: A61B,A61C,G01B,G16H

Abstract:
1. A hand held apparatus for determining surface topology of a portion of a three-dimensional dental structure, comprising: (A) a probing member having a front face and a sensing face; (B) an illumination unit for providing a plurality of individual incident laser light beams transmitted towards the structure along an optical path through said probing member to generate illuminated spots on said portion; (C) a light focusing optics including a confocal optics defining one or more focal planes forward said sensing face at a position changeable by said confocal optics, each light beam having its focus on one of said one or more focal plane; (D) a translation mechanism linked to said confocal optics and configured for displacing said confocal optics for changing thereby said focal plane relative to the structure along an axis defined by the propagation of the incident light beams; (E) a detector having an array of sensing elements for measuring intensity of each of a plurality of light beams returning from said spots propagating through an optical path opposite to that of the incident light beams; (F) an optical component configured for allowing transmission of said incident light beams therethrough towards said focusing optics, while redirecting said returning light beams to said detector, wherein said illumination unit is provided before the said optical component along the direction of the optical paths of said incident light beams; and (G) a processor coupled to said detector for determining for each light beam a spot-specific position, being the position of the respective focal plane of said one or more focal planes yielding maximum measured intensity of the returned light beam, and based on the determined spot-specific positions, generating data representative of the topology of portion.