Improvement on the Manufacturing Process of the Dental Surgical Guide Made by a 5-Axis CNC Drill Press

Abstract

Traditionally, three CT markers are attached to a surgical guide of dental implant surgery to correlate the implant positions in CT images and the drill positions of a drill press. To allow the drill press to know the positions of the CT markers, users need to use the press to probe the positions of them manually. This process is inaccurate and time-consuming. The objective of this research was to develop a new process to eliminate the traditional probing process. This new process uses two identical pairs of locating pins both in the plaster mold cavity and on the fixture of a CNC drill press, respectively. Since the position of the drill bit relative to the locating pins and the positions of the locating pins relative to the CT markers are designed by us, the drill press knows the positions of the CT markers without probing them. According to the preliminary evaluation results, the mean errors of the location and angle of the drilled holes were 0.696 mm and 1.23°, which indicate that this innovative idea presented in this paper is feasible and promising.