Intracanal aspiration, an useful tool

The use of intracanal aspiration can be useful in many situations during root canal treatment.

During the irrigation protocol we can use different irrigants (NaOCl, EDTA, Citric Acid...) to prevent the irrigants from mixing with each other, intracanal aspiration speeds up the drying process.

Another use during the irrigation protocol is to perform negative pressure irrigation, very useful in cases in which we know that the canals are connected by isthmuses or confluent canals.

We place the aspiration cannula in one canal and irrigate through the other, creating a flow of irrigants between both canals that helps us penetrate the irrigants into areas that are difficult to access.

In the case of very wide canals, such as some immature upper central incisors, we can use it to irrigate with negative apical pressure, bringing the hypochlorite to the working length without risk of extrusion.

It can also be useful to remove materials that we can find inside the ducts.

During surgical endodontic treatment, we can also use them to keep the surgical area dry, sometimes we can even insert it into the retropreparation to dry the canal.

On the market, there are some systems for this, such as the macrocannula of the Endovac system, the Endoaspirator Pro, etc.

We can also use an Irriflex irrigation tip, cutting the last millimeters of the tip, so that it does not become obstructed when aspirating, and with a connector, adapt it to the aspiration system.