Digital denture manufacturing - Application of abrasive computer tomography, CNC machining, and rapid prototyping technologies

摘要

The fixed partial denture produced by conventional method is greatly relied on the skill and experience of dental technician. Its quality and accuracy depends mostly on the technician's subjective judgment. In addition, the manual process involves many procedures which require a long time to complete. Most important, it does not preserve any quantitative information for future retrieval. In this article, a new device for scanning denture images and reconstructing 3D digital information of dental model by abrasive computer tomography (ACT) was designed and proposed. The fixed partial denture was then suggested to be produced by the rapid prototyping (RP) and computer numerical control (CNC) machining methods based on the digital information. A force feedback sculptor (FreeForm system, Sensible Technologies Inc., USA), using 3D Touch technology was applied to modify the morphology or design of denture. In this article, the comparison of conventional manual operation, digital manufacture using RP and CNC machining technologies for denture production was presented and the digital denture manufacturing protocol using proposed computer abrasive teeth profile scanning, computer-aided denture design, 3D touchable feature modification and numerical denture manufacturing were reported. These proposed methods provide a solid evidence that digital design and manufacturing technologies may become a new avenue for custom-made denture design, analysis, and production in 21st century.