Computer Aided Design of Implant Based Dental Restorations

Implant based dental restorations have many advantages over standard removable dentures because using implants can prevent the loss of jawbones, help restore facial features, and enable the patients to get firm bites. A critical step in this kind of restorations is the fabrication of the dental bar on which the denture sits. A dental bar is patient-specific because each patient’s jawbone is unique and the device needs to be conforming to the patient’s gingival surface. The design of a dental bar is crucial to the success of dental restorations. Traditionally, designing a dental bar is a lengthy and laborious process and requires high levels of craftsmanship. There have been attempts to develop CAD/CAM systems towards automating design and fabrication of dental restorations. However, currently available commercial CAD/CAM systems are only capable of making crowns, bridges, copings, onlays and veneers, and they are not capable of making dental restorations involving multiple teeth. The present paper describes a method for computer aided design of a dental bar used in implant based dental restorations. The method starts with a set of digital scan data representing the patient’s gingival surface and generates a CAD model of a dental bar that is ready for fabrication of a physical dental bar.