 Once the cast was hardened, the doctor would carefully remove it from the patient's foot and ship it, along with a prescription, to an orthotics lab which would use the negative of the cast to create an orthopedic insert.Recently, several companies have developed digital foot scanners that use specialized software to scan a patient's foot and create a "virtual" cast.These scans are made by having the patient place the foot onto a specialized flat image scanner that uses light and software to capture and create a 3D model.