Send the patient, not the files: a virtual patient model + your treatment intent in one Cympha case

The hardest part of working with a lab has never been the scanning. It's been the translation. A dental case is fundamentally what's in the patient's mouth plus what's in your head about that patient — the tooth you intend to extract, the prep margin you'd cut, the radiolucency you noticed on slice 47 of the CBCT. The traditional referral asks you to flatten both into a folder of STLs and a paragraph of typed instructions, then asks the designer to flatten it back into a workspace.

Information leaks at every step. The lab guesses what "trim distal of #14" means. You get an email asking for clarification. The first design comes back not quite right. A revision goes round.

We rebuilt the handoff to skip the flattening step entirely.

The case is the patient, plus the plan

In Cympha Studio, you don't assemble a folder of files. You assemble a virtual patient: the scans, the CBCT, the intraoral photos, the bite — all registered together in one workspace. You rotate them, scroll the CBCT, set the colors and opacities until the anatomy reads the way you want to read it.

Then you record your treatment intent right onto that virtual patient:

Circle the tooth you plan to extract — a red ring on the screenshot, captured into the case gallery.
Drop a distance pick on the rotation you want — the segment, the label, and the frame you measured from become a permanent visual record the instant you finish the pick.
Take a screenshot from the exact angle you want the lab to evaluate — the camera goes with it.

When you hit Create Cympha Case in the hamburger menu, the entire virtual patient + everything you marked on it travels as a single self-contained record into a new Cympha case. The lab opens that case and inherits both the patient and your understanding of them. They don't get a folder of files to re-interpret — they get the case as you saw it, with the reasoning already attached. Two of the five dimensions of a Living Case ship in that single action: 3D, the patient as a model rather than a file list, and Intent, the clinical reasoning that used to live only in your head.

Why this is different from "uploading files"

A folder of STLs tells the lab what the patient looks like. It says nothing about what you noticed, what you're concerned about, or what you want done. The lab fills that gap by reading your typed Rx, but typed Rx is a lossy medium for spatial reasoning — "rotate #13 ~10° mesially" sounds precise until the designer tries to interpret which direction "mesial" runs in the actual scan they're looking at.

The Cympha handoff replaces that lossy step with data that carries clinical intent:

The virtual patient model is unambiguous. Same scans, same CBCT, same registration, same camera. The lab is looking at the patient you were looking at — not a re-imported approximation.

Treatment intent rides on top of the model. A circle on the screenshot tells the designer "this tooth, this area." A distance pick with its auto-captured frame tells them "this dimension, this direction, this is what I saw when I measured it." A camera angle tells them "evaluate from here." None of that has to be translated through text.

Dimensional reasoning is preserved. Every distance you measure auto-captures the exact frame you confirmed it from — segment line, label, view angle — straight into the case gallery with the comment Distance: X.XX mm. Reviewers and designers see the picture of the measurement, not just a number that might be off by a millimetre because someone re-measured it from a different angle. The clinical reasoning behind the number survives the handoff.

What this changes downstream

Fewer follow-up emails. When the designer can see the tooth you circled and the angle you wanted them to look from, the "what did you mean by…" email doesn't happen.

Fewer revisions. A revision usually means the design solved a different problem than the doctor had in mind. When the doctor's intent travels as data instead of text, the design is much more likely to solve the right problem the first time.

Faster turnaround for the patient. Every revision round adds days. Every clarification email adds hours. When the case starts where you stopped — same patient, same intent — the design proceeds without the recovery loop.

Better fidelity to the original clinical reasoning. This is the subtle one. A typed Rx flattens the doctor's thinking; the designer rebuilds it from text. A virtual-patient handoff lets the doctor's thinking travel with the patient. The design that comes back actually reflects what you'd have done at the chair.

A calmer bench, not just a faster one. The gain is not one-sided. A designer who opens the case and can see what the doctor saw stops guessing, stops writing clarification emails, and stops carrying the quiet worry of having built the wrong thing well. That is peace of mind at both ends of the case — and a design the lab is glad to put its name on.

When the virtual-patient handoff matters most

Implant cases with bone-reduction targets. A red circle around the reduction area + a distance pick showing the depth + the camera angle you wanted the lab to evaluate from — together they say what no typed paragraph can. Worth confirming before you send: bone-reduction guides are an Implant Master Studio-tier capability on the lab's side, and prosthesis or combined guides need Enterprise.
Ortho cases with specific tooth movements. Circle the teeth, measure the planned shifts, capture the occlusion view. The designer sees the movement intent directly, not a description of it.
Crown and bridge cases where margin placement matters. An annotated screenshot of where the prep ends, with the camera locked on that margin, is worth several paragraphs of "subgingival, mesial-axial extension to…"
Anything with a CBCT. Studio reads a whole CBCT series in the browser — no account, no upload — and the CBCT view state travels in the bundle, so the designer opens to the same slice you were looking at. They see the same radiolucency, the same canal, the same anatomic landmark you flagged. If the treatment plan itself has to be built against that CBCT in OrthoPlus, the lab needs the Studio tier: CBCT and facial-scan inputs are not part of OrthoPlus Starter.

What's still the same

You still submit the case through Cympha's normal case-creation form. Clinical Rx text, lab routing, per-case pricing, lab-manager chat — all unchanged. The virtual-patient + treatment-intent handoff doesn't replace any of that; it gives the case a much richer attachment than "a folder of files." Doctors who like writing detailed Rx will keep doing that. Doctors who'd rather show than tell now have a way. And Studio remains the place you look and mark up, never the place a case is signed off: approval stays in Cympha, on the case's Review and Approve page, where you see the files and the lab slip before you sign — and where Request changes and Escalate to lab manager live.

Open the case from anywhere

A virtual-patient bundle is a first-class viewable in Cympha. In the case file list it carries an Open in Cympha Studio action right next to STLs and GVWs, and Studio opens it without the recipient needing an account of their own. Sharing the case itself with a referring specialist or a colleague is read-only and by email: they see the case and its files, and they cannot upload to it. Every file, label and status change is written to the case's append-only event log, so months later you can still see who added what and when. That is the People dimension of a Living Case — everyone who needs the patient sees the same one, and nobody can quietly change it.

What's next

We're not done. The natural extensions:

Persistent annotations in the source 3D scene (not just on screenshots).
A "request changes" path that re-opens Studio with the doctor's original handoff and the lab's working state side-by-side, so the conversation about a revision stays in the same virtual patient.
A measurements-only view for anyone who wants the dimensional record without loading the full workspace.

But the round trip works today. If you've ever felt that what arrived at the lab wasn't quite the case you saw in the chair, this is the path that closes that gap.

Open Studio at studio.cympha.com, assemble the virtual patient, mark up your intent, and look for Create Cympha Case in the hamburger menu. You'll need to be signed in to a Cympha account holding the Clinical role — the doctor-side role, chosen once on the role-selection screen and fixed thereafter. The lab side requires no setup — the bundled case is recognised as a viewable in Cympha by default.