<p style="text-align: justify">Dental implants are a prosthesis for missing teeth that are made to match a natural tooth. Current dental implant solutions experience a high risk of failure in patients that have diseases affecting the oral region such as osteoporosis, periodontitis, diabetes, etc. When the patient experiences one or more of these diseases, the interface between the bone and implant is compromised and patients can experience low success rates or insufficient remaining bone structure. The failures of the implant in the patient are detected a long time after insertion, this becomes problematic with diseases that develop after a few years of insertion. The purpose of this research is to create a dental implant technology that is suitable for both patients with healthy and unhealthy maxillary/mandibular bone that also could detect early failure of the dental implant. New solutions are studied in inducing pores into the Ti6Al4V implant and in previous solutions studied, inducing pores into the Ti6Al4V implant proved to mimic the material properties of natural bone which would result in enhanced osseointegration. The enhanced osseointegration would increase the strength of the interface between the bone and implant further allowing patients with diseases affecting the oral region to receive a dental implant. We plan to create an innovative solution with enhanced osseointegration that will ensure a gradient in mechanical properties. The complex geometry of the pore-induced dental implant is manufactured using the additive manufacturing method of selective laser melting. In this research, using CAD software and nTopology a functionally graded porous disk was designed using lattice-like pores to mimic the structure of bone. The porosity distribution was chosen by using a mathematical porosity model that predicts the Young’s modulus and Poisson’s ratio. The theoretical model is further validated using finite element analysis (FEA) before manufacturing. A parameter study of the selective laser machine was required to ensure the complex design of the disk and the micro-sized pores could be achieved. Multiple samples were created with different pore sizes ranging from 50-1000 microns setting different parameters for the hatch style, laser power, beam diameter, and hatch spacing to test the capabilities of the selective laser melting machine and resolution of the samples. Analyzing the samples further, a micro-CT scan is used to study the characteristics of the pores in the sample. Along with inducing pores to enhance osseointegration, a technology is developed to mitigate the risk of failure of the implant in both patients with unhealthy and healthy mandibular/maxillary bone. A non-invasive monitoring system using an embedded sensor in the implant will connect to a wireless device that provides information about the stress condition that will be accessibly to dentists to assess the condition of the implant. Ultimately the intelligent dental implant would enhance osseointegration along with detecting early failure of the implant, which will increase the life of the implant.</p>

Intelligent Dental Implant Design

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/IMECE/IMECE2021/volume/85543

ASME 2021 International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition (IMECE2021)

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