The dental robot is being used at Case Western Dental School

CLEVELAND (WJW) – Tooth number eight is one you really don’t want to lose. It’s in the front and everyone knows when it’s missing.

For Karen Fitch, getting his rules is a must.

“I actually fell while walking the dogs and knocked out part of my front tooth, so I had to have the rest taken out,” Fitch said.

While the extraction is done by human hands, the replacement is being done by a robot, controlled by the human hand.

The robot is called YOMI, a dental robot currently in use at Case Western Dental School. Dentists say that YOMI can perform implant surgery with incredible precision, especially when it comes to something like a permanent implant.

Dentists input a scan into YOMI which takes another scan of the patient’s mouth. It then matches the scans and calculates the depth and width needed to insert the implant.

Dentists then maneuver the machine into position, and it does the job, drilling into the bone, placing the implant and securing it in half the time it would take a human dentist to do it.

Case Western Dental School is one of the few dental schools in the country with the YOMI device. Doctors say this machine could be the start of new treatments.

The use of robots for surgery is nothing new, but for dentists, it is because of the tight spaces in which they have to work.

Dentists say YOMI and other machines like it could become standard in many dental offices in the next ten years.