MIRACLE: A CAD/CAM System for the Manufacture of Dental Surgical Splints

Nowadays, design and manufacturing process of dental prostheses is very handmade, time consuming and has a raised economic cost. Besides that, there is no objective methodology for the fulfillment of its functional design specifications. This paper presents an overview of MIRACLE project whose objective is the development and validation of an intelligent system for the design, simulation and flexible manufacture of implant-supported dental prostheses. The developed system in MIRACLE is a CAD/CAM system which allows to test the functional characteristics of dental prostheses considering mandible-maxilla interaction (called occlusion) using virtual models, contrary to most commercial solutions where this test is performed using expensive anatomical replicas tested with mechanical articulators and evaluated with patients. Another objective of MIRACLE is to develop a parametric finite elements model (FEM) of the whole prosthesis in order to analyze the failure risk of dental implants and prostheses before its surgical implantation enabling a re-design process. This paper is focused on the CAD/CAM subsystem developed in order to automatize the process of manufacturing surgical guides using several 3D models of the patient dental anatomy. A summarized version of the image processing step will be also presented. The CAD/CAM subsystem has been clinically validated achieving mean errors less than 5 degrees in the placement of the prosthetic crowns.