Predictable full-arch at scale: 30 cases in 4 months with PIC system

Introduction

When Dr. Peter Cheng-Chung Lin (林正忠) closed out his 30th full-arch photogrammetry case with PIC system this June, he ordered pizza. Enough for the whole clinic: every surgical assistant, every coordinator, and every technician who had a hand in getting patient after patient from failing dentition to a fixed set of teeth in a single visit. 

Lin had a name coined for the moment, too: "三十而例" — a play on the old line about turning thirty and finally standing on your own, with the character for "stand" swapped out for the one that means "case." Thirty cases in, his workflow with PIC dental stands on its own.

Dr. Peter Cheng-Chung Lin (林正忠) is a Taipei Medical University graduate with prosthodontic training at Chi Mei Hospital. He focuses on All-on-4 and full-arch reconstruction, teaches on All-on-4 training courses, and practices as deputy director at Xizhi Smile (汐止蒔美) and attending physician at Banqiao Smile (板橋蒔美) in Taiwan's Smile Dental Group.

30 successful full-arch clinical cases in 4 months: The PIC system that made it possible

Thirty full arches in roughly 120 days, without the rework loop that usually caps how many of these cases a practice can take on. That throughput doesn't come from working faster. It comes from trusting the first implant capture enough that the rest of the process doesn't fight you, and from being able to capture that record in whatever room the patient is in, at whatever branch, on a system small enough to bring along.

Lin's shift, in his own framing, was from thinking about devices to thinking about data. PIC system Station is what let him act on that shift across more than one location.

A detailed bimaxillary rehabilitation example: Case number 30

The latest Dr. Lin's rehabilitation was a bimaxillary immediate-loading case on Straumann implants. Five implants went into the upper arch. One of them came in below the primary-stability threshold Lin uses for immediate loading (roughly 15 Ncm), so rather than force it, he left that implant out of the immediate-load provisional and let it integrate undisturbed. The upper provisional was 3D-printed in OnX Tough 2 resin. The lower was built on a prefabricated PEEK framework carrying a 3D-printed fixed prosthesis.

Both arches were delivered within 90 minutes of surgery. Ninety minutes, two arches, one patient walking out with fixed teeth. That number is only possible when the data underneath it is trustworthy from the very first capture, exactly what PIC dental delivers across our entire range of solutions.

That's not a small claim in this field, and PIC dental has the mileage to back it: more than 1.4 million full-arch cases since 2010 across 50-plus countries, with over 50 peer-reviewed studies behind the precision.

From trusting the scanner to trusting the data

Lin gives a lot of talks, and he says the question he gets most often is "which piece of equipment do you think is the most important?" Navigation? The intraoral scanner? The printer? His honest answer changed over the years. It stopped being about the device and became about the data. A shift from an equipment-centric mindset to a data-centric mindset.

Digital doesn't mean error-free. Intraoral scanning is excellent for single units and short spans; but once you're working across the long inter-implant distances of an All-on-4 or All-on-X, the problem changes shape. Small stitching errors that never mattered on a single crown start to add up across an entire arch.

Everyone chasing full-arch work is really chasing passive fit, because they know what poor fit costs down the line: screws that loosen, screws that fracture, stress on the framework, chipped veneering material, and a patient who keeps coming back for maintenance. Lin's point is that passive fit isn't decided at try-in day. It's decided the moment you capture the first dataset. Every step after that (CAD, CAM, printing, milling) faithfully reproduces whatever was in that first capture, including its mistakes. Get the first record wrong and the rest of the chain just copies the error very precisely.

Looking back, he realized that verification jigs, alumina bars, donut jigs, prototype try-ins, and final digital impressions were all versions of the same instinct: checking whether the data can be trusted before committing to it. The real risk in a digital workflow isn't missing data. It's wrong data.

That's the gap photogrammetry fills. Its whole job is implant position, the true spatial relationship between one implant and the next, which happens to be the single most important record in a full arch. The scanner still handles teeth, soft tissue, the opposing arch, and the bite. Photogrammetry handles position. CAD merges the two. Each tool does the one thing it's best at.

The reason that makes PIC system reliable everywhere: portability

Here's where Lin's setup and his hardware meet. Because he works across locations, a system that lives bolted to one counter in one operating room would quietly limit how many cases he can run. He needed to capture implant position in whichever room the patient was sitting in, and he needed it to take seconds, not a room reservation.

For a practitioner like Lin, rotating between branches of a group, that last point is the whole game. The heavy, static part of the setup can wait at each location; the piece he actually carries is light. That requirement is exactly what the smallest PIC format was built for. It also takes under an hour to learn to operate, which matters when you want a workflow that a whole team can run.

If you're building a full-arch practice and the bottleneck is starting to look like your hardware being stuck in one room, the portable PIC system Station format is worth a look. Same 4 microns of precision. Much smaller case.

Interested in the format Dr. Lin uses? Learn more about PIC system Station or request a quote.

These cases were performed by Dr. Peter Cheng-Chung Lin in Taipei, Taiwan in 2026.