Patent ID: 7057639

Claim:
A portable intra-oral capture and display system, said system comprising: a handpiece elongated for insertion into an oral cavity, said handpiece including a light emitter on a distal end thereof for illuminating an intra-oral object in the cavity and an image sensor for capturing an image of the intra-oral object and generating an image signal therefrom; a portable, hand-cradled base flexibly tethered to the handpiece such that the base may be hand positioned relative to a user's line of sight without moving the handpiece, said base containing in a single integral enclosure a light source for generating light, electronics for processing the image of the intra-oral object for display, a display monitor for displaying the image of the intra-oral object, a storage for storing the image of the intra-oral object, thereby providing a stored image of the intra-oral object for subsequent review and access, and an interface for transferring the stored image of the intra-oral object to a peripheral device; wherein the base further includes interface electronics for transferring the stored image to the peripheral device through the interface, retrieving one or more stored images from the peripheral device through the interface and displaying the retrieved stored images on the display monitor, and a set of user controls for allowing the user to enable the interface electronics to transfer the stored image to the peripheral device and to retrieve the one or more stored images from the peripheral device; and an optical connection for transmitting the light from the base to the light emitter in the camera, and an electrical connection for communicating the image signal from the image sensor in the camera to the electronics in the base.