The Spotimplant Manifesto

The dental implant market is currently booming, resulting in an explosion in the supply of implant systems: we have indeed referenced hundreds of brands and thousands of different models.

Moreover, patients today are much more mobile than in the past. We explain this situation mainly by the phenomenon of medical tourism and that of globalization. Thus, it is possible that a patient from Brazil, who has a Korean implant placed 10 years ago, may now need implant restoration, whereas the Korean company has since closed down.

This is an extreme case but yet not an isolated one: in fact, over 80% of dentists report having been confronted with the problem of an unknown implant. Under these conditions, ensuring the traceability and sustainability of implant systems becomes very complex and time-consuming. It is simply impossible for a practitioner to recognize and become familiar with the thousands of implant systems in the world, and thus to find the related information such as references, compatible components, etc. However, this valuable information is essential in order to perform the implant restoration in good conditions and therefore provide the best possible care to the patient.

It is in this context that Spotimplant.com was born: our ambition is to provide the world's most comprehensive, accurate, and up-to-date dental implant knowledge base in order to help dentists and enable them to focus on their real value-added: patient care.

Spotimplant can be equated with the Wikipedia or the Google of implants. We spent months scanning catalogs, websites, and archives of various implant manufacturers to build the most complete and standardized database. We also manually collected and annotated thousands of anonymous dental implant x-rays.

More specifically, to help practitioners, Spotimplant offers products and features that combine:

• the most complete search engine in the world, allowing to search for all brands in an intuitive interface;
• an implant identification service based on artificial intelligence: using a retro-alveolar x-ray of an unknown implant, the system is able to predict which implant it is.

Many more features and resources will be added, always with the goal of centralizing and organizing all information and data points related to implants.

So our mission is to fight medical device obsolescence and ensure implant system sustainability. This is just the beginning, and to achieve this objective, we need your help. We invite all practitioners to join us in this mission by contributing to the website, submitting missing information, or simply sending us feedback.