How Is Burning CDs Still the Norm for Sending CBCTs in Dentistry?

Every dentist who's referred a patient out and needed to send a CBCT knows the routine too well. It's a pain for everyone, but nobody talks about it. Everybody just deals with it.

The typical flow looks something like this:

The team takes a CBCT scan. No sense in exposing the patient to more radiation, so sending the scan with the referral is the standard. The office manager burns a CD. Office staff draw straws for who has to drive it across town to deliver it to a specialist or dentist. Or maybe it's handed to the patient with a prayer that they won't lose it. That's a sample of the manual labor that is required to send CBCTs in dentistry.

If that all isn’t frustrating enough, the receiving end has its own list of hoops to jump through. In an ideal world, the receiving office will upload the scan upon arrival, but we all know that doesn’t always happen. Now the patient is in the chair and the doctor wants to see the scan. The receiving office has to go on a scavenger hunt before they can even look at the case!

Staff on both sides are doing the best they can with the tools available to them. I commend everyone who's persevered through the slog of burning CDs for all these years. What I couldn't wrap my head around was that this is still the ceiling for our industry. Dolphin built its own transfer format, but it only works if both offices are Dolphin customers. Dropbox is a separate subscription that lives on an island only able to do one thing. With subscriptions costing hundreds or even thousands per month to do only one thing that may only work with a few other offices in town, it’s easy to understand why most dentists avoid them. The result: we’re still stuck burning CDs because there's no better, accessible way to get the job done.

I honestly find it astounding that nobody has figured out a better way. AI is reshaping nearly everything about how healthcare runs, but dentistry is still burning CDs to get a scan three miles down the road.

A few months ago, I decided enough was enough.

Now Sindi includes CBCT transferring capabilities that actually make sense in 2026.

Dentists can send CBCTs directly with their referrals. Upload files straight from their imaging software, DICOM, STL, JPEG whatever it exports, and it travels with the referral form, the clinical notes, and the patient details in one send.

The specialist receives everything as one secure digital package so they can schedule the patient, plan treatment, and not waste time chasing down missing details.

General dentists can pay a very reasonable rate to send unlimited CBCTs. Or if they’re part of a sponsoring specialist’s network, they can send them for free.

Maybe the best part is that it runs both directions, keeping everything together from referral sent to case closed. The receiving office can send secure chat messages in the same referral thread and send post-op imaging back after treatment is complete.

One conversation, not a disc plus an email plus a phone call plus a text, the kind of scattered trail that turns finding a detail into a needle-in-a-haystack search.

It's HIPAA-compliant end-to-end, encrypted in transit and at rest. No separate Dropbox subscription to manage. No blank CDs to keep in stock. What used to take hours or days now takes a couple of clicks and a minute or so to upload. Then it's tied to the referral record permanently, not floating around, always at risk of getting lost.

Dentistry didn't need any groundbreaking AI innovation to solve the CBCT transfer problem. It just needed a simple tool that gets CBCTs from A to B and allows the teams to work together.

If your practice still relies on discs, drives or Dropbox to move CBCTs, there's finally a better way. See how CBCT sharing works inside Sindi, or get some time on my calendar for a quick walkthrough.