Non Destructive Diagnosis for Minimum Invasive Access Preparation in Endodontic Treatment

Abstract

Root canal treatment of infected root canals represents a large percentage of business in general dental practice. It is an expensive process and often prone to failure. During root canal treatment, destructive access preparation by removing parts of tooth crown and dentin is usually needed even before a clinician’s inspection and diagnosis. This paper presents a non-destructive method for accessing the internal tooth geometry by building a 3-D tooth model from 2-D radiograph. The geometry of root canals is then formulated into a mathematical model. Based on this mathematical model, the treatment procedures utilizing the dental tools/instruments are planned by a computer aided prescription system, which yields the tool selection and tool path for the root canal preparation by an intelligent micro drilling machine with on-line monitoring. To minimize the removal of healthy tooth crown and dentin, thus protecting the strength of the patient’s infected tooth, an optimization algorithm is utilized for planning the access preparation in the root canal treatment. Although an opening of a tooth crown is still needed so that dental instruments can reach the root canal, the non-destructive 3-D modeling and the optimization of the access preparation in the new approach makes the root canal treatment minimally invasive compared to present techniques.