An Expert System for 2D Stress Analysis of Human Teeth

Abstract

The concepts of rapidly and automatically obtaining the stresses found in specific human teeth and performing quick parametric studies has been a persistent goal in bioengineering. Finite element analysis (FEA) is a powerful approach for human tooth stress analysis and has been applied to various dental researches. However, the whole FEA process is a major challenge to dental researchers since special simulation skills and expert knowledge in mechanics are required for constructing proper models and obtaining accurate results. This paper presents an expert system that permits dentists with no engineering expertise to obtain stress distributions accurately and rapidly for various dental applications. The expert system for 2D stress analysis of human teeth is developed on the customization platforms provided by commercial computer aided design (CAD) software (ProEngineer Wildfire 3.0, Parametric Technology Corporation, Needham, MA, USA) and FEA software (MD Patran R2, MSC Software Corporation, CA, USA), respectively. A knowledge based system is built for helping users carry out the whole FEA process automatically. Graphical user interfaces (GUIs) are constructed for inputting the necessary tooth information such as dimensions, material properties, etc. An orthodontic application is presented for showing how the expert system works. The approaches developed and applied here can be expanded to provide automatic stress analyses for many other applications as well.