How to incorporate recent improvements in invisalign into clinical practice

The author has been using Invisalign since 2002 and, over the last eight years, has treated in excess of 300 patients using this technique. Over the years there have been many improvements and modifications, referred to in previous articles,^1,2 to overcome some of the limitations of using the appliance and these will be discussed in this article. All of the modifications are now available in the UK since the launch of Invisalign G3 in May 2011.³

Power ridges (Figure 1) are built into the aligner in both the upper and lower incisor region, where torque of the incisors is required. Initially, these were only being placed on the labial surface of these teeth, but a weakness of this was that, when retraction and torquing of the upper incisors were required at the same time, this did not, in fact, happen and only tipping occurred. In order to overcome this, palatal/lingual power ridges (Figure 2) have also been placed to affect the moment of force.