PHOTO: ADOBE STOCK

If you have ever had a dentist put a crown in your mouth, you’ll remember the process.

There’s numbing, there’s drilling — and then the dentist tamps into place a pinkish gloop to make a mold for the new tooth. Then you have to wear a temporary crown for two to three weeks while you wait for the lab to make that new tooth.

But at Smiles by Hart, a father-daughter dentistry office in Shadyside, the gloop is gone.

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After years of training and investing more than $800,000 in computerized equipment, Smiles by Hart is completely digital. If a patient needs a crown, it is designed and milled on the spot, eliminating the need for a temporary crown or squishy impression material.

If an implant is required, the dentists can use a 3D X-ray to help design a surgical guide that allows precise placement of the screw that will support the new tooth. And if patients need dentures or mouth guards to keep from grinding their teeth, those can be manufactured upstairs using a 3D printer.

The Harts — father John, daughter Victoria and mother Laurie, who serves as office manager — are at the leading edge of a digital wave that eventually will turn many dental practices into one-stop shops for everything from fillings to crowns to multi-tooth implants.

The process at Smiles by Hart starts with scanning patients’ teeth, either with intraoral wands that can take thousands of pictures or with 3D X-rays.

If someone needs a crown (a custom-made cap that covers and protects a damaged or decaying tooth) or implant, special software will design the replacement piece or tooth and send instructions to a milling machine that fashions the material out of lavender blocks of lithium disilicate or zirconium oxide — two strong compounds ideal for use in dentistry.

Even though the ceramic blocks are pale purple, each one will turn into different shades of white after curing in an oven at 800 degrees.

At their office, patients choose the color of the new tooth to match the shade of their permanent teeth and check how it looks and feels in their mouths, Victoria Hart says.

That was one thing that impressed Maria Perez, a patient who is getting her silver amalgam fillings replaced there — both for cosmetic reasons and to repair other areas. In her initial treatment, Victoria Hart found decay beneath the filling on a lower right molar and determined it needed a crown. She also said two of Perez’s teeth behind it needed other work.

Hart said she could do all three teeth in one 4-hour session if Perez was willing to stick it out.

“I said, ‘You know what? Let’s go for it,’” Perez recalls.

Perez since has decided to have all of her silver fillings replaced. During a Zoom call, she opened her mouth wide to show how well the crown and other work matched her existing teeth. “If you look at my mouth now, it has completely changed the way I smile. It’s not a closed-lip smile anymore.”

Recognizing that it’s the emerging standard in dentistry, the University of Pittsburgh School of Dental Medicine has embraced the digital trend enthusiastically, according to Dr. Robert Nerone, vice chair of the restorative department and director of chairside digital dentistry, and Suvendra Vijayan, assistant professor and director of 3D printing and advanced technologies.

The school is devoting three full labs to digital dentistry, and adding special equipment that can scan a person’s mouth and produce three-dimensional images of the teeth and bone.

At the same time, the professors said, they still have to teach the traditional analog approach to dentistry as well, partly because “Pittsburgh is a slower moving market,” Nerone says.

Many dentists have dipped a toe in the digital pool by purchasing intraoral scanners and then shipping the digital images to a lab to create crowns or implants, he says.

All-digital practices like Smile by Hart are more the exception than the rule — at the moment.

The field is evolving rapidly, but the process will take years to complete, says Nerone. “We’re making sure the students are trained for what is available for right now, but also for what is going to be more prevalent in 10 to 15 years.”

Mark Roth is a freelance writer and the former science editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.