My interest is not only in implants, so they can chew, but also changing their appearance. What excites me about oral surgery is that we can change people's lives. Some patients have a horrible bite and problems with asymmetry. Schmid: One the aspects of our specialty is moving the jaws around to change patients' faces. Q: How important is the aesthetic aspect of what you do?

The stent allows us to do those same implants on the patient. It has holes in it that allows us to place the implants correctly, because we did the implants first on the computer. The stent is a temporary plastic appliance we anchor to the jaw with pins. We use that stent to place the implants without doing any incisions. Then we can take that information and it will be sent to a laboratory to fabricate a computer-guided stent, which they ship back to us. The advantage of (virtual implant treatment plans) allows us to take (scans of) a patients jaws and insert the implants in their jaws on the computer. The other innovation is the advent of the CT scans for face and jaw. Schmid: What I'm excited about it what we're doing now: virtual reality implant treatment plans. Implants really underwent their explosion in the '90s and 2000s. They walk out with a complete set of fixed appliances that they do not remove. We can take people with no teeth at all and give them back their entire dentition.

It has allowed us to give back to patients the teeth that they've lost.

Schmid: The greatest impact for us has been the advent of dental implants. Q: What innovation during your career has had the biggest impact on patient outcomes?

Virtual reality mind lock