Digital Manufacturing of Implant Based Dental Restorations

Traditional methods of producing dental bars for overdentures involve tedious and time-consuming operations that demand substantial human labor and demanding skills. Though there exist several CAD/CAM systems that have been developed for various dental restorations like bridges, crowns, etc., there exists no commercial CAD/CAM system at present for design and fabrication of dental restorations for missing multiple teeth. In the research described in the present paper, CAD models of dental bars for implant-retained dental restorations were used as input for three types of fabrication processes: rapid prototyping followed by investment casting, CNC milling, and direct digital manufacturing. Details of material and process combinations and results of comparing these three types of processes, including an analysis on dimensional accuracy, are discussed.