Development of a computer-aided design software for dental splint in orthognathic surgery.

Xiaojun Chen,Yi Sun,Xing Li,Jan Egger,Constantinus Politis,Lu Xu

doi:10.1038/srep38867

Abstract

In the orthognathic surgery, dental splints are important and necessary to help the surgeon reposition the maxilla or mandible. However, the traditional methods of manual design of dental splints are difficult and time-consuming. The research on computer-aided design software for dental splints is rarely reported. Our purpose is to develop a novel special software named EasySplint to design the dental splints conveniently and efficiently. The design can be divided into two steps, which are the generation of initial splint base and the Boolean operation between it and the maxilla-mandibular model. The initial splint base is formed by ruled surfaces reconstructed using the manually picked points. Then, a method to accomplish Boolean operation based on the distance filed of two meshes is proposed. The interference elimination can be conducted on the basis of marching cubes algorithm and Boolean operation. The accuracy of the dental splint can be guaranteed since the original mesh is utilized to form the result surface. Using EasySplint, the dental splints can be designed in about 10 minutes and saved as a stereo lithography (STL) file for 3D printing in clinical applications. Three phantom experiments were conducted and the efficiency of our method was demonstrated.

Highlights

The softwares mentioned above are commercial and the involved algorithms are not reported
Compared with the traditional softwares, an easier and more efficient approach to design the splint is adopted in EasySplint
The architecture of the software is divided into the following four modules: 1. The module for preprocessing: The CT data of a patient can be imported into EasySplint to reconstruct the maxilla and mandibular models based on image segmentation, region growing and marching cubes algorithm

Summary

Methods

The module for preprocessing: The CT data of a patient can be imported into EasySplint to reconstruct the maxilla and mandibular models based on image segmentation, region growing and marching cubes algorithm. The architecture of the software is divided into the following four modules: 1. These two models can be repositioned according to clinical requirement

The module for generation of the initial splint base

The module for interference elimination

Results

Discussion