Development of a computer-aided design software for dental splint in orthognathic surgery

TL;DR

This paper introduces EasySplint, a novel software that streamlines the design of dental splints for orthognathic surgery, reducing design time to about 10 minutes through automated steps and mesh operations.

Contribution

The paper presents a new computer-aided design software for dental splints that simplifies and accelerates the process compared to traditional manual methods.

Findings

Design time reduced to approximately 10 minutes

Effective Boolean operations based on mesh distance fields

Validated through three phantom experiments

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.