ALEXANDRIA, Va., July 3 -- United States Patent no. 12,347,567, issued on July 1, was assigned to Align Technology Inc. (San Jose, Calif.).
"Smile designer" was invented by Michelle Stone-Collonge (Campbell, Calif.), Eric E. Kuo (San Jose, Calif.), Rick M. Matty (Scotts Valley, Calif.), Fabio Pettinati (Cupertino, Calif.), Thomas Maurer (Santa Clara, Calif.) and Dzmitry Sanko (Fremont, Calif.).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Various methods and systems for designing a restored smile are provided. One method includes receiving scan data of a patient's teeth, developing a digital model of the patient's teeth via a computing device, where the model represents the patient's teeth based upon the sca...