title: Mechanical benefits of conservative restoration for dental fissure caries.
abstract: The principle of minimal intervention dentistry (MID) is to limit removal of carious tooth tissue while maximizing its repair and survival potential. The objective of this study is to explore the fracture resistance of a permanent molar tooth with a fissure carious lesion along with three clinical restoration procedures, namely one traditional and two conservative approaches, based upon MID. The traditional restoration employs extensive surgical removal of enamel and dentine about the cavity to eliminate potential risk of further caries development, while conservative method #1 removes significantly less enamel and infected dentine, and conservative method #2 only restores the overhanging enamel above the cavity and leaves the infected and affected dentine as it was. An extended finite element method (XFEM) is adopted here to analyze the fracture behaviors of both two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) modeling of these four different scenarios. It was found that the two conservative methods exhibited better fracture resistance than the traditional restorative method. Although conservative method #2 has less fracture resistance than method #1, it had significantly superior fracture resistance compared to other restorations. More important, after cavity sealing it may potentially enhance the opportunity for remineralization and improved loading bearing capacity and fracture resistance.
authors: School of Aerospace, Mechanical and Mechatronic Engineering, The University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia. Electronic address: leo.zhang@sydney.edu.au.
authors: Zhongpu
authors: Z
authors: Zhang
authors: School of Aerospace, Mechanical and Mechatronic Engineering, The University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia. Electronic address: marcokk88@gmail.com.
authors: Keke
authors: K
authors: Zheng
authors: School of Aerospace, Mechanical and Mechatronic Engineering, The University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia. Electronic address: liquanbingeric@gmail.com.
authors: Eric
authors: E
authors: Li
authors: School of Aerospace, Mechanical and Mechatronic Engineering, The University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia. Electronic address: wei.li@sydney.usyd.edu.au.
authors: Wei
authors: W
authors: Li
authors: School of Aerospace, Mechanical and Mechatronic Engineering, The University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia. Electronic address: qing.li@sydney.edu.au.
authors: Qing
authors: Q
authors: Li
authors: Discipline of Biomaterials, Faculty of Dentistry, The University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW 2010, Australia. Electronic address: mswain@mail.usyd.edu.au.
authors: Michael V
authors: MV
authors: Swain
mesh_terms: D003750:Dental Fissures / Q000473:pathology / Q000628:therapy*; D003793:Dental Restoration, Permanent / Q000379:methods*; D020342:Finite Element Analysis; D055595:Mechanical Phenomena; D008963:Molar
keywords: Dental caries; Finite element modelling; Fracture resistance; Minimal intervention; XFEM