title: Development of a computer-aided design software for dental splint in orthognathic surgery.
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.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Biomedical Manufacturing and Life Quality Engineering, State Key Laboratory of Mechanical System and Vibration, School of Mechanical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China.
authors.forename: Xiaojun
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.affiliation: Institute of Biomedical Manufacturing and Life Quality Engineering, State Key Laboratory of Mechanical System and Vibration, School of Mechanical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China.
authors.forename: Xing
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Li
authors.affiliation: Institute of Biomedical Manufacturing and Life Quality Engineering, State Key Laboratory of Mechanical System and Vibration, School of Mechanical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China.
authors.forename: Lu
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Xu
authors.affiliation: OMFS IMPATH Research Group, Department of Imaging and Pathology, Faculty of Medicine, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium.|Department of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery, University Hospitals Leuven, Leuven, Belgium.
authors.forename: Yi
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Sun
authors.affiliation: OMFS IMPATH Research Group, Department of Imaging and Pathology, Faculty of Medicine, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium.|Department of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery, University Hospitals Leuven, Leuven, Belgium.
authors.forename: Constantinus
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Politis
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Computer Science and Biomedical Engineering, Institute for Computer Graphics and Vision, Graz University of Technology, Graz, Austria.|BioTechMed-Graz, Graz, Austria.
authors.forename: Jan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Egger
mesh_terms: D017076:Computer-Aided Design; D017267:Dental Prosthesis Design / Q000379:methods*; D006801:Humans; D057909:Orthognathic Surgery; D010516:Periodontal Splints; D012984:Software