A Smart Digital Workflow Towards High Precision and Through-Put Production for Removable Partial Dentures

Overview

Tooth loss is a major chronic problem in dentistry and edentulous elderly endures poorer quality of life worldwide. Removable partial dentures (RPDs) are the most widely accepted and cost-effective treatment for patients to restore oral functions. RPDs contain three components including the metal framework, denture base and acrylic teeth. Conventionally, RPD fabrication involves tedious clinical and dental laboratory procedures and is time consuming, labour-intensive, and often imprecise, therefore incapable of meeting the growing demands of RPD by an ageing population. The challenges to achieve a high quality and high-throughput RPD service lie in three aspects: 1) accuracy in capturing oral profile; 2) immediate oral information analysis and device design, and 3) automation in production.

Tooth loss is a major chronic problem in dentistry and edentulous elderly endures poorer quality of life worldwide. Removable partial dentures (RPDs) are the most widely accepted and cost-effective treatment for patients to restore oral functions. RPDs contain three components including the metal framework, denture base and acrylic teeth. Conventionally, RPD fabrication involves tedious clinical and dental laboratory procedures and is time consuming, labour-intensive, and often imprecise, therefore incapable of meeting the growing demands of RPD by an ageing population. The challenges to achieve a high quality and high-throughput RPD service lie in three aspects: 1) accuracy in capturing oral profile; 2) immediate oral information analysis and device design, and 3) automation in production. Towards this goal, we have developed an intelligent RPD design software prototype, SmartRPD, to generate RPD metal framework design using digital scans from patients. SmartRPD processes patient-specific scanned geometry instantly, provide diagnosis analysis and generate the first draft of metal framework design automatically, powered by a teeth geometry segmentation system, knowledge-based design algorithm and 3D geometry engines. Dentists make the final clinical changes and confirmation before sending the 3D digital files for 3D printing. Thereafter, an altered digital scan technique is used to register a precise digital scan of soft tissues under functioning, using the metal framework as a loading impression tray and digitally align to the initial oral scan. This resulted modified master scan file leads to a more accurate setting for the denture base in the subsequent procedures.