By Jason Eisenberg

Anyone who has needed a tooth restoration knows what a long and arduous process it can be. In most cases, patients are required to see their dentist multiple times over the span of a couple of weeks and many are forced to wear a temporary during this waiting period.

Two Riverdale natives are working to change all that.

David and Marisa Birnbaum are the co-founders of MobileTek Labs, a super-equipped van that carts the equipment needed to make onsite tooth restorations - in an hour.

The brother-sister team, both graduates of Bronx High School of Science, work directly with dentists practicing in Riverdale and Westchester.

Since starting the business in October, the pair has already gathered more than a dozen dentists for their program and they believe that this roster will expand significantly as word continues to spread.

"I actually got my inspiration for this after my own trip to the dentist," David Birnbaum explained. "I just could not believe people were still waiting up to two weeks for crowns, veneers and other tooth restorations, so I thought, why not make things more accessible by physically bringing the lab to the dentist."

On the day of an appointment, the Birnbaums drive the van right to the door of the dentist's office. They receive the patient's tooth impression from the dentist, bring it back to the van and begin the process using a two-piece machine known as CEREC 3. First, the damaged tooth is scanned using an infrared camera and the 3-D image is displayed on a computer screen. Using the computer's software, the tooth is redesigned and scaled onscreen to fit the appropriate space in the patient's mouth.

Once the digital reconstruction is complete, the image is sent to the second part of the machine, which uses a high-speed diamond bur and disk to carve the restored tooth out of a solid block of ceramic material. The lab has dozens of different ceramic blocks to match the varying colors of patients' teeth. The finished restoration fits perfectly on to the original impression and is then brought back to the dentist, who uses a special adhesive to re-attach it to the damaged tooth.

In total, the whole process takes around two hours.