Additive Manufacturing: Current Concepts, Methods, and Applications in Oral Health Care

Abstract

Additive manufacturing is an emerging technique that has almost revolutionized the material science and mechanical engineering in recent years. The technique started to help engineers to actualize the concepts of their minds by fabricating diverse three-dimensional objects in a layer-by-layer fashion. Multitude of processes such as stereolithography (SL), polyjet, fused deposition modeling (FDM), laminated object manufacturing (LOM), 3D printing (3DP), prometal, selective laser sintering (SLS), laser engineered net shaping (LENS), and electron beam melting (EBM) is considered as a part of additive manufacturing. Recently, additive manufacturing has received a lot of attention in the healthcare sector for fabricating devices for the purpose to restore, support, and repair defected human body parts. Particularly, the field of dentistry rather extensively deals with such restorative work in order to improve the functional and aesthetic demands of today’s oral healthcare sector. This chapter shall present a focussed update on the current concepts, methods and diverse applications in the field of oral health care, based on contemporary published literature relevant to the subject. Further, it shall provide the future scope of research to address the challenges, for the widespread clinical utilization of additive manufacturing technologies in routine clinical dental care.