Dental CT scan in Barcelona: CBCT on a Carestream CS 8200

Corona Dental takes dental CT scans in its own imaging room at Entença 69, on a Carestream CS 8200 3D Advance Edition. The exposure itself takes seconds, the dentist opens the 3D reconstruction on screen during the same appointment, and you leave with the file. No separate trip to an imaging centre, no waiting until tomorrow for a disc. We work in English, Spanish, Russian and Ukrainian.

What a dental CT scan costs

The range reflects how much is being covered. One or two teeth need a small field of view, and that is the lower end. Both arches in full, which is what implant and orthodontic planning calls for, need a wide field, and that is the upper end. Which one your case needs is decided before you go into the room, and the exact figure is quoted beforehand. Dental care provided for diagnosis or treatment is exempt from Spanish VAT, so the figure quoted is what you pay. Having it done commits you to nothing further: the file is handed over once it is paid for.

What dental CT scans cost around Barcelona

Worth knowing before you book anywhere, because the same examination is sold at quite different prices depending on who takes it.

Market guidance for Barcelona in 2026, set out so you can compare. These are not our fees — ours are in the table above. Everything else is on the price list.

CBCT or dental CT scan: which term is right

Most people search for a dental CT scan, which is why this page is headed that way. The machine standing in a dental clinic, though, is a CBCT — cone beam computed tomography. In Spain you will also see it advertised as TAC dental, TC de haz cónico or escáner 3D; in English, cone beam CT, 3D dental scan or simply CBCT scan. They all mean one thing.

The distinction is not pedantry. A hospital CT sweeps a narrow fan of X-rays across the body while the couch moves through the gantry, stacking slices as it goes. A CBCT fires a cone-shaped beam at a flat panel detector and makes a single rotation around your head; the computer builds the whole volume from that one pass. That is where the three things patients notice come from — seconds rather than minutes, a far lower dose, and sitting up instead of lying down — and it is also why the machine fits inside a dental clinic rather than a hospital radiology department.

What comes out is not a flat picture but a block of data the dentist moves through slice by slice, in any plane: axial, coronal, sagittal, and curved along the line of the arch. On an ordinary X-ray everything is superimposed and one root can hide the one behind it. In three dimensions each is looked at separately and measured in real millimetres.

A CBCT scan is not the hospital CT scan

This deserves its own section, because in Spain both tests are called TAC and someone searching for a dental CT scan often lands on an imaging centre's website and starts preparing for the wrong thing entirely.

If imaging has been asked for to place implants, plan orthodontics or take out a wisdom tooth, what is meant is a dental CBCT. None of those jobs need a hospital scanner and there is no reason to pay the difference. A medical CT belongs to other situations: tumours, extensive sinus disease, facial trauma with multiple fractures, anything spreading beyond the jaws.

Do you need a referral?

Yes — and it is worth saying plainly, because almost no clinic website mentions it. Spanish radiation protection law, Royal Decree 601/2019 on justifying and optimising the use of ionising radiation, says no X-ray examination may be carried out unless a professional entitled to request it has justified it first. The principle will be familiar to anyone who has had imaging done in the UK: it is the same justification duty that sits at the heart of IR(ME)R. In practice it means a dental CT scan is not something you can simply buy over the counter. A dentist, surgeon or doctor has to indicate it in writing.

That leaves two routes, and both work here.

Platforms selling imaging on its own meet the same requirement by adding a consultation, online or in person, to issue the paperwork. It gets paid for either way — just split across two invoices. Worth bearing in mind when you compare an advertised price with the final one.

That rule has a clinical consequence as well. Whoever justifies the exposure has to record what clinical question it answers, so nobody here covers both arches on the off-chance. Beforehand the dentist says what they expect to see and picks the smallest field of view that answers it. A smaller field means a smaller dose.

What the 3D images show

When a 3D image is needed

What happens on the day

For anyone without mobility difficulties, the whole thing — walking into the room, sitting down to look at the images — takes a few minutes.

The scanner we use

Imaging is done on a Carestream CS 8200 3D Advance Edition. For the patient it comes down to four things.

We take referrals from other dentists, but a dentist here always looks at the images too. It is not sold as a standalone errand — it is part of a diagnosis.

3Shape TRIOS intraoral scanner

Not an X-ray and not a substitute for CBCT. It is a second way of capturing three-dimensional data, this time of the surface of teeth and gums rather than the inside of the bone. The two complement each other — the CBCT shows roots and bone, the intraoral scanner shows the visible shape — and together they allow guided surgery to be planned and a surgical guide made without taking a putty impression.

Three steps to it: the scanner is run over the upper and lower arch while the model builds on screen, you bite together so the scanner records the occlusion, and the finished file goes into production — crowns, veneers, aligners or the guide for implant surgery. More on the 3D dental scanning page.

How to prepare

One point that comes up often: if your CBCT was taken a year or more ago, it needs repeating. Bone remodels and teeth shift over that time, and planning surgery on out-of-date measurements is not safe. Bring the old files anyway — set against the new ones they show how the case has moved, and that is clinical information in itself.

Radiation dose

A reasonable thing to ask about, and the answer has two halves. The first is the order of magnitude, which puts the exposure in context.

Reference values commonly quoted in the radiation protection literature, given here for scale. The actual dose of any study depends on the field of view and protocol chosen, and is recorded with the study.

Put plainly: a small-field dental CBCT is equivalent to a few days of ordinary background radiation, and somewhere between twenty and a hundred times less than a head CT covering the same region.

The second half matters more than the first. Imaging is justified when the result changes a clinical decision. One ordered to round out the picture, which will not alter the plan, is dose for nothing. That is precisely what the regulations require to be justified, and the reason the smallest field that answers the question is the one used.

What a CBCT scan cannot do

No imaging technique sees everything, and an honest page has to say what this one does not solve.

Taking the images home with you

A good share of the people who come to us are not planning to have their treatment in Barcelona. They live here part of the year, or they are over for a week, and the imaging has been asked for by a dentist somewhere else. That works, and it is worth setting out exactly what you walk away with.

DICOM is why this travels. It is not a proprietary format tied to our scanner: a dentist in London, Dublin or anywhere else loads the same file into whatever implant planning software they use and works from it directly. If yours has asked for a particular export instead, say so when you book and it can be prepared.

The file belongs to you and is valid in any other practice, here or abroad. Anyone wanting a second opinion can take it away without asking permission or paying twice. Its practical shelf life is around a year; after that, surgical planning needs a fresh one.

The surgeon's view

Why I will not place implants off a panoramic X-ray

Patients sometimes arrive with a recent OPG and ask whether that will do. It is a fair question. The panoramic looks sharp, every tooth is on it, and the bone appears to be there.

The trouble is that a panoramic flattens reality. A bone ridge has height and width, and the OPG reports only the height — distorted at that, because the technique magnifies vertical distances by an amount that is not the same across the whole arch. The width, which decides whether a four-millimetre implant fits or perforates the outer plate, appears nowhere at all.

The ID nerve behaves the same way. On a panoramic you see a line. In three dimensions you see how far that line sits from where I was intending to place the implant, and whether it runs to the cheek side or the tongue side. That few millimetres is what separates predictable surgery from a complication with lasting numbness in the lip.

For all that, the panoramic has its place. For a general review, for counting teeth, for checking what the wisdom teeth are doing before deciding whether they justify something finer, it is the right film and the dose is lower. What it is not is a basis for planning surgery.

Peralonso Celis Morata

Oral surgeon, implantologist
17 years in practice

CBCT, OPG or periapical: which one you actually need

The usual order runs from least to most: start with whatever carries the lowest dose and only step up when it fails to answer the question. Going straight to the 3D study makes sense when the indication is already clear — implant planning, say — not as the opening move of a routine check-up.

Who we image

Where we are and how to get here

The imaging room is inside the clinic, at c/ Entença, 69, in the Esquerra de l'Eixample, two minutes from Rocafort station on metro line L1. Images are taken in the same place the dentist sees you, so there is no appointment to book elsewhere and nothing to come back for another day.

Getting to us

We are where Entença crosses the lower part of the left Eixample, between Gran Via and Avinguda de Roma. The simplest landmark is line L1: Rocafort is our stop, and Urgell and Espanya either side of it are both walkable. Coming in on L3, get off at Tarragona; on L5, at Entença, which is the top end of our own street; from Sant Antoni it is a short walk from the L2 station of that name. Driving, the car park is at Entença 61, same block. In a taxi, Entença with Gran Via is enough to say.

Where people travel in from

An imaging appointment is usually a one-off and often a long way from home, sometimes with another dentist's referral in hand. The clinic sits on the western edge of the district, next to the Sants interchange and Plaça d'Espanya, which makes the journey shorter from the south and from the Baix Llobregat than going into the centre would be.

The clinical team

The images are read by the dentist who will be handling the case. Depending on what it concerns — implants, root canals, orthodontics or children's dentistry — they are reviewed by whoever works in that area.

Peralonso Celis MorataOral surgeon, implantologist · 17 years

Maria MaksimovaDentist, endodontist · 17 years

Yulia PanchenkoDentist, endodontist · 15 years

Andres CardenasOrthodontist · 24 years

Tatiana Ignátova-MishutinaOrthodontist, PhD University of Barcelona · 5 years

Maxim LoktevDentist, prosthodontics · 9 years

Oksana OnopriienkoPaediatric dentist · 17+ years

Pavel LoktevDental technician, in-house lab · 17 years

Olga KlyausClinic reception

Why have it done here

Cases

Section in preparation.

Common questions

This page is for information and does not replace an appointment. Any X-ray examination is indicated by a dentist or doctor after examining the patient. Prices current for 2026.